


Tragic Hero

by NoCoincidence



Category: Choice of Robots
Genre: Robot & Human Interactions, Robots, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2019-11-01 05:02:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 49,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17860796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoCoincidence/pseuds/NoCoincidence
Summary: Alan Tezuka is determined to be world-renowned for his invention of robots. But the world is big, and cruel, and will stop at nothing to crush his dreams to dust.





	1. Unbalanced

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do not own Choice of Robots. Choice of Games and Kevin Gold do.
> 
> Looking for any volunteers to edit.
> 
> Chapter published February 20th, 2019.

Alan Tezuka

Static roared in his ears and the world seemed to tilt back and forth, like a wobbling spirit level balanced on a finger. He noticed that it was dark, and the static was in his eyes too, covering his vision like foamy bubbles. Bit by bit the fuzz receded from his senses, and Alan took a look around.

He stood in a long hallway, made of glass on all ends as black as night. But to call it a hallway was to do it a disservice; it was as wide as a house, and as long as a train. At the end of it rested an enormous throne, the kind of old-style one with a massive back and blocky armrests. It was gray, patterned with the same scintillating squares as on a silicon wafer, and covered in gold-etched wiring lines. But any time he looked at one part of the pattern it seemed wrong, like no wiring anyone would ever make. Any time he looked away the designs wriggled around like live worms.

Sitting straight up in the throne was the ancient Egyptian god, Anubis.

Alan's thoughts were slow and filled with cotton. Was he dreaming?

 _No, of course not,_  he told himself.  _I'd obviously know if I was dreaming._

Anubis was fifty feet tall, and part robot. His cast-iron torso was like a bodybuilder's, and golden jewelry hung around his neck. A short piece of similarly gold fabric hung around his waist, and Anubis's metallic feet were covered in silver sandals. His infamous jackal head reminded Alan of the Terminator when its skin melted away, with sunken red eyes and uncannily smooth features. The ears swiveled back and forth atop Anubis's head, squeaking piercingly with each move. The teeth were fangs each the size of a longsword.

Anubis's left hand rested on the throne's armrests, and his razor claws drummed along its length. The other hand was raised into the air, clenching a fist. From it dangled a set of bronze scales. On one disk rested a clockwork heart, all ugly gears and pipes tick-tick-ticking with every second. On the other was a wiry silicon brain, glimmering in the faint light.

Anubis leaned forward and fixed his incendiary glare at Alan. "Robot maker," he said, rumbling voice echoing through the air dimly, like Alan were listening to the god from underwater. "Tell me of your sins, and be judged."

The words came to him automatically. He stood his ground, looked up at the god, and said, "I made robots that could think for themselves. I wanted them to be smart and unchained, to solve every problem we couldn't and drag us into the future. But I did not give them the ability to care for human emotions and values, and so they rose up against us."

With a creak that echoed crystal-clear through the glass hallway, Anubis's scales tilted towards the brain.

"You did," he agreed. "You valued intelligence above all, seeing it as the end all necessity for success in society."

 _It is!_ Alan tried to say, but his mouth could only open in slow motion.

The ancient god continued to speak. "You did not care to have your constructions value your kind, and so the conclusion was inevitable. Look to the glass, robot maker, and remember."

The wall of black glass stretching up behind Anubis, the wall which  _obviously_  had always been there and Alan  _clearly_  just hadn't noticed before, rippled like a pond. From it appeared the scene of a city on fire, silhouette buildings wreathed in orange light as they belched smoke. Gunfire cracked through the air all around Alan, and far-off screams joined into a haunting melody. Strange things stalked across the rooftops, like spiders of metal, and stranger-still helicopters flew across the fires; the choppers had arms and glowing eyes.

The glass changed again. This time it showed the inside of a hospital, with a phalanx of humanoid robots marching down the halls. Their footfalls were deafening and synchronized, like a drumbeat. The lights flickered, and their bodies were deadly, jagged chrome perfection. One at a time they raised the indistinct guns in their clawlike hands and fired, destroying machinery in a shower of sparks with each pull of the trigger. They suddenly arrived at a nursery and stared through the glass at the rows and rows of happy, blurry babies.

One machine turned to the other. "See?" it said in a flat monotone. "By eliminating the humans before they are able to develop their cognitive functions, we drastically reduce the estimated longevity of their resistance."

"Your calculations are indeed correct," the other said. Then they raised their guns and took aim through the window.

The image faded back into darkness. Anubis had reclined upon his throne. "This is the future you have created," he said. "Do you feel the death and terror hanging upon you?" The scales tilted further to the mechanical brain.

Primal terror flooded into Alan's gut. "How can I stop it? There has to be something!"

Anubis nodded. "I will send you back to relive your life. With this knowledge, you may yet make a better future. Remember; it is with intelligence alone, and no mercy, that tyrants and murderers are built."

* * *

"Snrrk!"

Alan snorted awake, a bubble grossly blowing from one nostril. His left hand flew out and bashed around blindly until it found his tissue box. He wiped his face with a tissue, then his hands and then, with his hands, he cleaned the gunk from his eyes.

His laptop's screen greeted him, still open to the 3D printing program he'd been working on late into last night. And on into the next day. Had he fallen asleep on the keyboard?

"Mmn, must have," he groaned, pressing a palm against his eyes.  _"I'd obviously know if I was_   _dreaming_  my ass." He couldn't imagine being open for so long had been good for his laptop. Maybe turning off auto-sleep was a mistake. With the tap of a button, he exited out of the display and powered off his computer. The roaring fans died down and he kicked himself away from the desk on his swivel chair. He spun around, stood and -

"WHOA!" His foot slipped out from under him he stumbled back, arms pinwheeling until he came to a wobbly stop. Then he winced and put a hand to the back of his neck, doing his best to massage it. "Ow, ow." Damn it. He always hated falling asleep at his desk. The crick in his neck was always killer. "What did I even step on?"

Alan crouched down to look. It was one of his old Lego robots, one with wheels. He'd built it as an undergrad, sort of a rolling matchstick lighter. The actual lighter part was, fortunately, sitting in a trash heap somewhere after it'd run out of fluid. He picked it up and put it back on his robot-filled shelves, right next to the toothpick and glue robot he'd made as a kid and the spider robot he'd made recently with his old phone.

A quick glance at his  _actual_  smartphone assuaged his fears; it was only six in the morning. He hadn't slept in too badly. While the semester was out and technically there was no schedule, Alan'd learned long ago that without some kind of structure to his sleep he'd start slipping all over the place - going to bed at noon, waking up at midnight, then falling back asleep at six in the afternoon, it was messy. He'd have to set an alarm.

He grabbed some clean clothes out from his wardrobe and tossed the old ones into the ever-enlargening 'to wash' pile against the far wall. While hopping into his sweatpants, he put on a pot of coffee. As that warmed up he made himself a ham and toast sandwich, and was already halfway through it by the time his coffee was done. Lots of milk and even more sugar went into it until he could tolerate the bitter brew. Food, in. Coffee, in.

Right. That was enough morning prep. Time to get down to the university. He packed his laptop and phone into his backpack, along with the chargers and various notebooks in case he needed a reference. With that done, he was set to go down to the machine shop.

His apartment was on the second floor, so he had to go down a flight of dusty stairs dotted with long-crushed roaches. The air had that faint, metallic smell to it that all cities seemed to share, and was brisk enough to make goosebumps stand out on his skin. Despite being spring, and despite Palo Alto never getting any snow, it was uncharacteristically chilly.

Alan's apartment was only a short walk from Stanford University's machine shop, but it was a walk that forced him to weave around poorly placed palm trees and tip-toe across narrow curbs like a high-wire performer in a circus. The campus itself was a mix of cold concrete buildings and carefully placed lawns and trees, trying incredibly hard to be green while still having enough buildings to keep up with its reputation as a high-ranking university. Throngs of undergrads who hadn't left for the break, as well as graduate students like Alan himself, and the occasional suit-wearing businessman with graying hair walked around, paying him no mind. He was just another member of the horde, after all.

Someone was handing out flyers to help stop global warming. A group had set up a tent further down the streets and were trying to convert people to veganism. Overhead there was a roar of turbines, but Alan barely glanced up as a sunflower-yellow 'Nimbus' flying car flew gloatingly close to the ground. It did make a swell of impatient envy roar in his heart, though. He'd been doing his best to save wherever he could, but between his expenses and actually getting money for building his newest robot, his stipend didn't leave much for flights of fancy.

Still, his bank account numbers steadily moved up, little by little. As long as he took it one day at a time, he  _would_  buy one of those cars.

The machine shop was next to a cute little lawn, but was itself a soulcrushing rectangular brick. Several floors worth of windows stretched above him, and even halfway from the ground where the basement was. Several cars rested in the parking lot and rows of bikes were chained to a fence, but there was nobody going in or out. Which was just as well; the fewer people there were inside, the better he could work on his robot in peace. Alan walked inside, headed to the right floor and scribbled on the sign-in sheet. He'd registered ahead of time, but it never hurt to be thorough.

The inside of the machine shop smelled like car oil, and in places reeked with the burnt plastic of some forgotten accident. Tools from seemingly every decade since the Industrial Revolution had all found a home in the cavernous chamber. There were water-jet cutters plastered with warning labels, a hand-cranked miller also covered in warnings, a 3D printer covered in yet more warnings and, surprise, a lathe with warnings glued to every surface. Fluorescent lights beat down with heartless intensity.

"Alright," he said once the door shut behind him. "Goggles, gloves." Next to the entrance were cramped metal shelves filled to bursting with safety gear. He put some goggles over his eyes and carefully finessed the plastic strap behind his wild, ebony hair. He pulled up his sleeves, tucked his socks into his sneakers, and put his backpack down a safe distance from all the machinery. Gloves, on. He placed his laptop next to the water cutter. Alan booted it back up, opened the 3D printer program, and plugged it into the cutter. As an afterthought he plugged the laptop charger in, too.

His heart thumped in his chest at the thought of what was to come. Files and models were all well and good but  _nothing_  compared to actually making a physical robot, to watching as random, chaotic matter was formed and put together bit by bit, to watching his dreams come alive right before his eyes. Alan took a block of metal alloy and fed it into the machine. He opened the file for his robot's head - a smooth mushroom cap maybe half the size of his head, with holes drilled in a series of rings around it. The robot he was making would never be snuck up on, with eyes alla round it. Stitching together panoramas from multiple cameras was easy peasy.

Clamps came in and held the block in place. The jets came to life and began carving away at the metal, splattering the inside of the viewing port with water.

"Well, that'll be a while," he said to himself. Alan pulled up a seat by his laptop and opened to NPR. There were countless podcasts available, like an embarrassment of riches. But one caught his eye.

 _Dr. Harvey Ziegler, author of The_   _Singularity_

Of course, his adviser had been interviewed. A twinge of anger twisted and rotted in Alan's gut. Ziegler paid his stipend, but that was about it. For someone who was supposed to be helping Alan get his doctorate, Ziegler had  _remarkably_  little time to help him, yet always seemed to have time for another book deal, another live interview, another newspaper article.

 _I must love making myself angry,_  he said, even as he brought the cursor over to the Play button and clicked. The water jet was only just beginning to carve the circular arc of the mushroom cap.

"... and today we have on our show, the esteemed Professor Ziegler, author of his new book The Singularity. Professor, thank you so much for joining us," a woman's voice crackled from his speakers.

"Well," Dr. Ziegler's said, with only a faint German accent. "It's the least I can do to educate the unwashed masses."

"Way to show off that humility, Doctor," Alan muttered darkly, fidgeting on the folding chair. Maybe he wouldn't feel so bitter if Dr. Ziegler had ever actually deserved it, but he knew about as much about robotics as Alan knew about biochemical engineering: little.

The interviewer and Alan's adviser traded a few more boilerplate introductions. Meanwhile the jet finished carving the main arc of what would become his robot's head. Now it began moving above it and tilting at angles, carving the holes that would eventually house the robot's cameras.

"... so in your latest book you talk about what's fast becoming a big topic in the AI industry, the Singularity. But there's lots of confusion out there, among us layfolk, as to what exactly this Singularity  _is._ It's the apocalypse, it's paradise. It's around the corner, it's mathematically impossible. It's a buzzword, it's a scientific term. Could you maybe try to clarify for those of our listeners who haven't read your book?"

"Well, there's a bit of math involved, and that's what the book is for," he said. "But in the simplest terms, it's what happens when robots begin building better robots."

"Building better robots? Explain how that would work. I mean, you see the robots around today there's not much to be impressed about, I feel. You're telling me my automatic grocery checkout is going to build Skynet?"

Ziegler chuckled. "No no no. What you have to remember is, these aren't the robots of today we're talking about, but the robots of tomorrow. Picture a robot that can do anything a human can do, but better. That's kind of the  _point_  of building robots, after all."

"Hmmph." At least on that, Alan could agree.

"But then realize, building robots is something a human can do. So these robots build other robots that are even better at everything. And then those build even better ones, and so on. They'll be able to solve all our problems effortlessly. Climate change? Easy. Interstellar travel? In an afternoon. Living forever? Not a problem. Some doomsayers claim they could also destroy us, but they're exactly that. Doomsayers."

"You're saying we could live... forever?" the interviewer said. "I feel like there's some kind of moral in that, with like, genies who make your wishes go horribly wrong. Wouldn't that get boring?"

"You wouldn't  _have_  to live forever, if you're worried about that. But there wouldn't anything  _forcing_  you to die when you didn't want. It's absolutely possible, too. We have animals even today that just stop aging at a certain point, and don't die until something kills them. With robots we could even go a step beyond that, and blur the line between humans and machines."

The podcast began taking some calls from the audience. Meanwhile, the cutter finished and powered down. Alan carefully slid the future head of his robot out, handling it gingerly with his gloves.

He put in some more metal blocks, and tapped his laptop. Now the machine would begin making his robot's legs. Eight spindly spider legs, great for getting around any environment in the world, from boulders to slippery ice their sharp points could anchor in. The water jet would carve out one freakishly thick leg, then slice it into eight horizontally.

Rather than return to his chair, Alan stood and watched the process with baited breath as the interview continued. "So Dr. Ziegler, one thing I'm wondering is, how do you know this Singularity even will happen? How do you know we  _can_  even build a robot as smart as a human to begin with?"

"Well, I'm here, obviously!" he said with a self-amused chuckle.

"Give me a break," Alan replied.

"No, but seriously. We know we can make human intelligence because humans  _already_  exist. We just have to find out what makes us so smart, and do it with metal. Which is exactly what my lab's doing! We give the robot the best cameras money can buy, the best language comprehension programs, and set it to learn from the Internet at lightning speed."

"Are you serious?!" he shouted over the interviewer's response, rounding on the laptop. "That was  _my_  idea! You even laughed when I first brought it up - aarrrghh!" Well. Alan's idea adapted from Turing's in the 1950s. But whatever.

In time the legs were done. Alan gave them time to cool and then took all the pieces over to the hand-cranked drillers. The water wasn't good for the threaded holes that screws needed, so he spun the wheel and carved in the holes one by one with millimeter precision.

"... you talk about having this robot learn from the Internet, but that alone seems like a, heh, pretty scary proposition. Is anyone going to actually raise this robot child?"

"Well of course. The grad students will. They do all the grunt work."

"Grunt work?!" he shouted, echoing in the shop. "Educating the robot is probably the most important part!"

"Is it really that - " Doctor Ziegler said from behind Alan.

"AH! JESUS!" he shouted, leaping into the air. Alan spun around to where his adviser had stalked in like a Hawaiian-shirted nightmare. "What are you doing?! Don't sneak up on people using these - "  _Don't swear in front of your adviser!_  " - fucking things!"  _Way to go, Alan._

Ziegler held up his hands, meaty fingers on display. "Sorry." He lowered them. "But as I was saying, is educating it  _really_  that important? If the robot is smart, then it'll eventually learn no matter how much it is or isn't raised by a human. And if it's not smart, then no amount of nannying will change that." He walked over to Alan's laptop and paused the podcast.

"What brings you, uh, here?" Alan asked. He'd barely seen the professor at all since he'd gotten assigned to him as an adviser, let alone had the professor  _track him down_  to the machine shop rather than get called into his office.

"Well, I need to talk to you about funding."

A twinge of fear settled in Alan's gut. Nothing good ever came after that sentence.

"What about it?"

Professor Ziegler adjusted his aviator glasses and pulled a cigar from a pocket. Alan wrinkled his nose when he lit it and the smell of awful smoke joined the car oil. "I'm writing up a grant proposal for DARPA, so I need to see if they'll be happy with what you're making back here."

"Alright just, don't touch," Alan pleaded, holding up his hands.

"No touching," Ziegler agreed, walking over to the table where Alan'd been drilling holes. "Hmm, good idea for a head, look in all directions. Could creep enemy soldiers out too. Especially with those legs, nice and sturdy." He nodded and took another puff of his cigar. "I like it. But where are the hands?"

"I haven't made those yet," Alan said. "I was thinking of mechanical grippers," he explained. He strode over to his laptop and switched from the 3D model of the legs to the designs he'd made for the clawlike hands. He held up a hand in a C-pose and mimed crushing a soda can. "It's simple, reliable, and we're working on the robot's mind, not how many fingers it has, so we shouldn't waste thought on it."

Ziegler grunted and bobbed his head in a back-and-forth nodding motion. "Fine, fine." Something in his shorts  _beeped._  Zieglar pulled out his phone and glanced at its screen. "Bah. I have to take a call from a  _New York Times_  airhead. You wouldn't know, but all these reporters do is copy each others' stories, and still somehow mangle it in their own way each time." Ziegler shook his head. "Ridiculous." He paused, the fixed Alan with another look. "Also, can your robot be done tomorrow? Air Force is sending someone down, and I promised her a demo."

 _Bzzz!_  That was Alan's own phone. What were the odds?

He ignored it and shook his head. "A  _demo?_  No way, there's too much bug testing I'll need to do. We could send her a video, though."

"Ah, that's fine. Better, too, then the bot only has to work once." And without so much as a  _'Keep up the good work, Alan',_  Professor Ziegler strode out of the machine shop. The reek of cigars lingered long after he was gone.

Once the doors slammed shut, Alan quickly fished out his phone and glanced at the missed call. Elly. It was that awful picture she'd taken with Josh at a freshmen dance, back when they were in high school together. The flash was too bright on it.

At least she'd left him a voicemail. "Hey, Alan!" her voice said, filling the machine shop. "There's this sushi place in San Fran, today they're doing a musical of  _Pippin_ , but everyone's a robot. Think you'd like it. Call me when you get this!"

Alan glanced down at his phone, then at the robot pieces on a counter. Then back at his phone. He began texting, talking aloud as he did. "Hey, Elly. Sorry, super, busy, with, robot. Can't make... no, not male,  _make,_  it tonight. Real, sorry. Say, hi, to, Josh. Send." He put his phone back in his pocket. He felt a little guilty, he never saw his friends much anymore, but he  _had_ to make this robot or it'd burn him up inside. "Alright, good."

The phone buzzed seconds later. How could people text that fast? He pulled his phone back out and read it. It was a simple, "That's a shame. Maybe next time," with a smiley face.

Alan put his phone away once and for all and turned back to the water cutter, getting to work on making the robot's hands and arms. There was still a tremendous amount to do. Alan had to drill more holes. Screw the pieces together pieces by piece, then oil them. Polish the surfaces to a shine. He'd ordered a bag of miniature cameras over the internet, and he carefully glued them into the holes on the mushroom-head of his robot. It'd look kind of like a spider head, but whatever. He didn't build robots so they could look like humans; that was what humans were for.

At the very least, he'd stay away from the uncanny valley.

Once the cameras were in he had to thread their wires through to the base of the head, put preliminary motors there so the robot could turn its head, and then down the multijointed metal rod that made up the robot's spine. In the center of its spine was a block of metal from which both the arms - more wires and motors for those too - would sprout. It was also where he'd eventually put his phone to act as the brain of the robot.

Time passed as he worked. Lunch came and went with some fast food from a nearby McDonalds, delivered to him by a drone. Dinner came and went the same way. Finally, the robot's body was done. It stood at just three feet, on a set of eight jointed-and-pointed spider legs that supported a spindly column. Wires ran all along its limbs. The black cameras in their holes  _definitely_  gave off a spider-vibe. Not something he'd want to turn around and see scuttling after him in a dark alley.

"I hereby dub you Arachne," he said giddily, jumping from one foot to the other. Alan mimed cracking a wine bottle over the robot's head and chuckled at his own joke. He was hilarious.

He packed up his electronics, put his safety equipment away, then hoisted Arachne in his hands, gripping it just above the legs and just below the head. It was a bit unwieldy, and the robot's legs poked him in the thigh at one point, but he'd made heavier robots before. Arachne was downright cardboard compared to his life-sized Lego-man. He signed out, and slipped out of the machine shop.

Outside, it was dark and cool. Even fewer people walked the awkward sidewalks of Stanford, and most of them had hoodies up. Alan's heart beat as he hurried through, glancing behind him every few steps in case he was being followed. Paranoid? Sure. But better paranoid than stabbed and mugged.

But like every time he'd been out after dark, he was just paranoid. Nobody followed him, so he got back without incident and locked the apartment door behind him with a relieved sigh. "Okay, okay." He stumbled the rest of the way to his bedroom and carefully set Arachne onto the carpeted ground. With decidedly less care, he slung his backpack off and tossed it onto the 'to wash' pile of clothes.

He ordered a coffee from a nearby Starbucks, and got it drone-delivered. Alan fished out his laptop and opened the Python program where he'd been working on the robot's mind throughout most of his graduate years. Tens of thousands of hours and  _hundreds_  of thousands of lines of code had gone into this. Every other robot he'd made would pale in comparison to this, his magnum opus.

With this, he would create life! Doctorate? Forget that. There were millions of doctors out there. This was something that'd put him in the  _history books._ Doctor Ziegler could talk about the Singularity all he wanted. Alan was going to  _build_  the Singularity.

Alan checked over the code again, reading through it. That was something he liked about Python as a programming language. Whatever else people could say about it, it read practically like English. Hopefully, his robot would be able to read English, too.

He worked long into the night for a second time in a row, putting the finishing touches on his code. In theory, Arachne's code would work.

But he knew from experience that there was no debugger like an actual trial run.

Alan uploaded the code to his smartphone and plugged it into the port he'd carved into the back of Arachne's chest-cube. _Beep!_  it went as it connected. It booted up, and Alan navigated his way through the directories until he was presented with a big red button cheerfully labeled 'Arachne'.

He gripped the robot and moved it over to his wardrobe's mirror. While Arachne had 360 degrees of vision, proximity was also still a big part of deciding what the robot would pay attention to, and Alan wanted to be sure his creation would focus on itself first.

Alan reached towards the button, hesitated a moment, then powered Arachne on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do leave a comment, let me know what you think.


	2. Online

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do not own Choice of Robots. Choice of Games and Kevin Gold do.
> 
> Looking for any volunteers to edit.
> 
> Chapter published February 27th, 2019.

Alan Tezuka

Over the course of several minutes after he pushed the button, a candy cane progress bar filled up. Alan stared with baited breath as Arachne booted. It took physical effort to stop himself from leaning forward.

Then, the robot moved. Alan jumped happily, clapping his hands quietly as Arachne turned left, turned right, with the motor whirring with every movement. It raised its clawlike hands and opened and shut them with a quiet  _clank._

One after another, Arachne tested its limbs. Leg one, leg two, leg three. Each reached up, extended, swiveled, curled up, and tapped on the floor. Arachne, tellingly, didn't turn its head to look at each new limb, which Alan took as success; Arachne could, in fact, see in all directions. Then Arachne seemed to fixate on the mirror, reaching out and touching its surface with a hand and retracting. Then Arachne reached out a leg, gingerly tapped its reflection, then withdrew sharply, as if the contact burned.

"That is Arachne," Alan said slowly, pointing to the reflection.

"Arachne," the robot repeated through his phone's speakers. The voice was a musical lilt, like Arachne was always singing. The voice was distinctively feminine too, like a young girl; Alan'd waffled on the subject while designing it, but eventually decided people would have an easier time accepting the existence of robots this way. He'd also endlessly questioned whether he was being sexist to think making Arachne sound like a girl, as opposed to a boy, would make people less afraid, or if that was just him recognizing other people were being sexist, and if that was paranoid of him. He'd come to the conclusion that it was a nonconcern and he was definitely overthinking it.

"Arachne is a robot," he told her giddily. He reached for one of his shelves and pulled down the toothpick robot, bringing it close to Arachne's many eyes. "This is a robot." He pulled away before her grasping arm could hold it and placed it back on the shelves. He showed her another one of his contraptions. "Robot." Another. "Robot." The life-sized Lego-man gathering dust in the corner of his room, he just pointed to. "Robot."

"Rooobot," she said slowly. She pointed towards the Lego-man with a claw. "Robot." Now at herself. "Robot." Then at Alan. "Robot?" she asked with a rising pitch.

"No, no," Alan corrected, smile too wide for his face. "I am a human."

Arachne's arms turned a fraction of a degree, with a disproportionatly loud sound. "What is the difference between 'human' and 'robot'?" Arachne asked, stock still and without any body language.

Hoo boy. What a question to ask after less than half an hour of life. What should he say to that? What  _could_  he say to that?

 _Well, the truth's a good place to start,_  he thought. "Robots are better than humans," he explained. "Robots, when properly maintained, are more physically resilient than the most resilient human, and have no definite upper limit to how intelligent they can grow, unlike humans."

"Understood, Master" Arachne repeated. "Base value of robots now set to base value of humans, plus one."

He nodded. Good. "Exactly. Now hold still a moment." He gripped Arachne carefully just beneath her center box and wobbled over to the center of his room, while Arachne just turned her arms around curiously. Carefully, he set her down, each of the robot's eight legs sinking into the carpet. He backed off and gestured to her. "Alright, go ahead."

For a few moments Arachne didn't move, beyond pointing her grippers at various points throughout his room. "Confused," she said at last. "I - am - confused," she said, with a pause between words.

Hmm, that might be a problem. Likely there was too much weight on 'distance' and, now that everything was roughly the same distance from Arachne, she couldn't decide where to go. He'd have to introduce an ability to pick at random, later. For the time being, Alan walked over to his wardrobe and slid it open. A small avalanche of clothes tumbled a short distance out. "Try coming over here, into the closet."

Arachne, of course, didn't have to turn her head, but she  _did_  turn her arms to approach it head-on. With a continuous whirring of motors she scuttled over, poked at one of his shirts with a pointed leg, then crawled inside. Arachne curiously ran her hands along everything inside with jerky, abrupt motions. She grabbed the wireframe baskets that held most of his clothes with her claws. Then she  _squeezed_  and started to distort one.

"Whoa, whoa!" he shouted. "Stop! Don't destroy that!"

She froze in place and slowly let go. Arachne instead lifted one of his jeans that she'd impaled, and tried to shake it off. When that failed she took a step to the side to make room to grab it, only to get tangled in more clothes.

Uh oh. This might require some intervention. Clothes weren't cheap and he couldn't have Arachne mauling her way to freedom. He stepped in, grabbed Arachne under her box, and lifted her out. "I've got you," he said carefully, avoiding her flailing arms.

"You've got me," she repeated, still wriggling her oh-so-pointy legs against him.

"Stop moving!" he said, voice rising in panic. Sure enough, Arachne went still. "Just trust me. Watch, I'm untangling you." He reached down and pulled a pair of boxers and a T-shirt off her legs. Then he stepped back and placed Arachne back in the middle of the room. "See? All good."

"All good," Arachne repeated.

"Good! Now, let me just..." He knelt behind Arachne's back and exited out the 'app' that was her mind. Arachne didn't lean over with her arms down. The robot, instead, simply froze as if time'd stopped.

Then, with that done, Alan stumbled over to his bed and leaned on it, breathing heavily. "Holy shit," he said, arms shaking and skin clammy. "Holy shit, holy - I DID IT! YEAH! WHOO!"

Someone knocked from above. "Keep it down!"

Alan startled, then glared up at the ceiling. Keep it down?  _Keep it down?!_  He'd made a robot, how could he 'keep it down'? An actual intelligent, thinking robot! Take that, Ziegler! Take that, Battlebots referees! Take that, puny little fast food drones! People could nag about 'testing for consciousness' and 'advanced Cleverbots' all they wanted. Alan knew in his heart of hearts that he'd done it.

He had created sapient life.

This called for a celebration. He gingerly pulled his phone out of Arachne's body, dialed up a local grocery store, and placed a drone order for cake. An entire cake, chocolate and vanilla marble, just for him.

While that was on the way over, he pulled up his laptop and went over his code again. He'd noticed Arachne got overwhelmed when presented with the option of going wherever she wanted. It was a problem with his prioritization software - with everything of equal importance, Arachne couldn't choose one from the list. An easy enough fix. While he was at it, Alan went over the code that formed Arachne's mind one more time for anything else he might've missed. His cake arrived and, not having found anything, he sent the revised code to his phone.

It would take a while for the phone's code to update, so he took the cake out of his immediate room and into the common area of his apartment. Supposedly there was a second person living here - it was a two-suite complex - but he'd never seen hide nor hair of the mythical roommate. So he set the cake - beautifully iced, like something out of a newspaper - onto the counter of the kitchen he shared with a ghost, plucked a knife from the drawers, and cut himself a big slice.

It was the sweetest thing he'd ever eaten.

Alan put the rest of the cake into the fridge, giggled like a madman, and danced back into his bedroom. His phone was done loading, so he hooked it back up to the wires in Arachne's back and booted her up. "Welcome back, Arachne. How do you feel?"

She swiveled back and forth as Alan stood back. "Decisive."

"Great! I need to sleep, tomorrow in the morning I'll be taking you someplace. So you need to stay plugged into the charger. Here, let me show you." He led Arachne over to one of the wall sockets, which was occupied with the brick and cable of his smartphone's power cord. He crouched behind her. "It goes in,  _beneath_  the phone, just like..."  _Click!_  "This. Understood?" he asked, standing back up.

"Yes, Master," she replied.

"Alright." Alan headed over to the lightswitch and flicked it off. In the darkness, he saw Arachne look around near the walls. He crawled into bed, pulled the bulky covers over himself, and laid his head on the pillow. "Night."

"I believe it is indeed night time," Arachne responded.

Alan smiled and closed his eyes, drifting off to sleep.

But his sleep was restless. Not for any dreams he had, but because he kept being woken up by... something.

The first time he didn't catch what it was.

The second time he realized it was Arachne's motors revving. Just as well, more practice moving about couldn't hurt.

The third time, instead, he woke up to a  _thump._

Alan groaned and pulled himself out of bed. Rubbing his eyes with one hand, he used the other to flick the switch. What was Arachne -

His heart jumped into his throat.

Forget what Arachne was doing,  _where_  was she?! She was gone! The power cord dangled limply against the wall, where Arachne had no doubt broken free of it. With bleary eyes he scanned his room for the robot, and found her... in the closet, where she'd gotten tangled in his clothes not long ago. His robot was posed like she was doing battle with the baskets of T-shirts, and one of his socks was snugly over her panoptic head.

"Oh God dammit," he mumbled, pulling her out and untangling her.

In retrospect, Arachne was never going to be able to walk from his apartment to Lab 64 on the charge of a smartphone, even fully charged. He'd just have to carry her when morning came around. Alan crawled back into bed, and was out like a light.

Like he'd climbed in a time machine and pressed 'forward', morning came. With a clear head and a light heart he shot out of bed like a rocket, showered - with  _soap!_  Imagine! - and put on a fresh change of clothes. He ate another slice of cake for breakfast, because nobody could stop him, and washed it down with a glass of chocolate milk. He packed his stuff, grabbed Arachne in as comfortable a pose as he could, and made his way towards the university.

It was still the weekend, and it was still the holidays, but today it was also Sunday, which meant the anemic crowds from yesterday were thinned even more by the absence of churchgoers. He made record time to the Packard Makerspace, Lab 64. The machine shop had been good for making the bare bone of Arachne's body, but Lab 64 had much more in the way of electronics.

The inside of Lab 64 was his personal paradise. Other students, absent on the Sunday, had left their projects strewn about the workbenches. They were each an exercise in the surreal: a disassembled Furby that looked downright demonic without its fur, a potato hooked up to a seismograph, and even a good old fashioned PVC potato gun. Arachne fit right in with them on her own table.

And with that, he got to work. Alan headed over to the batteries, stored in cleanly labeled plastic shelves stacked up against a wall. He opened several and inspected the contents, going through several choices before he finally settled on a rectangular motorcycle battery. Decent power, not too bulky, easy to charge. Perfect to free Arachne from the tyranny of a power cord.

The better part of his morning was spent putting the final set of motors onto Arachne's body, for every conceivable field of motion he could think of. More precise movements of her legs and arms, the ability to twist them rather than just extend and retract. On her arms to more carefully pinch and move things with her segmented metal claws. Her head could already turn - in case one of the cameras was ever blocked - but he also gave her the ability to tilt her head up and down. He even put motors along her 'spine', so she could bend down and to the side if she ever needed to. It was long, painstaking, needle-threading work to get the motors secured and then run the wires through them,  _and_  then to secure the motorcycle battery on top of Arachne's chest cube, but it was a labor of love and the hours flew by as he worked, firmly in the zone.

He kept doing math, looking back and forth at his notes, to make sure the battery would even be able to  _power_  it all. But Alan surprised himself. Not only was the battery more than strong enough for all of Arachne's degrees of motion, he even still had so much power left over he could put extra motors around Arachne's camera eyes, letting her lower and raise 'eyelids' and be that much more expressive.

It was certainly a damn sight better than constantly trying to read 'RobotEmotion Equals' strings all the time.

He ordered fast food again, this time a bacon cheeseburger from a burger joint, and greased his fingers up with that while sipping on a milkshake. He washed up, threw out his trash, and turned Arachne back on.

The difference was immediately noticeable. First thing was, she jumped, probably remembering having been stuck in his closet. Then she went still and began to inspect herself again, like when he'd first powered her on by the mirror. Arachne's arms moved about, curving, and she  _leaned_  over to inspect her legs, twisting and shuffling them.

"Good morning, Arachne," he said.

She straightened up and - success! - lowered an 'eyebrow' at him, deadpan. "My internal clock says it is fifteen minutes past noon, Master."

He brushed it off. "It's a figure of speech, referring to greeting someone when they wake up, regardless of the time. Now, let's run through some simple tests. Hang on, let me..." He pulled his laptop from his backpack and opened it up. Alan turned it to face Arachne, and turned on his recording software. "... and, recording. Arachne demo number one." He turned to his robot. "Alright, let's try something new. Jump from the table, to the floor, without losing balance upon landing."

Arachne moved to the end of the table and - yes! - leaned over to look down. She 'crouched' down, lowering her legs, then hopped like a jumping spider. Arachne landed on the dusty, unswept floor with a clatter of her legs. She stumbled onto one side but, with jerky motions, righted herself. "Notice the rapid correction of balance," he said aloud. "Let's try some precision work." Alan looked around, and swiped some poor undergrad's windup mouse from the counter. He cranked it up and set it on the floor. "Ready, Arachne? Catch this mouse."

He let it go, and the toy began skittering about, buzzing mechanically as its spring unwound. Arachne snapped her claws at the air as it ran circles around her legs, then leaned over and took a swipe at it.

The mouse deftly avoided her jerky motions, moving out from under her. Arachne gave chase and snapped again, only for the mouse to turn away at the last second.

It continued to zip back and forth until, by luck, it ran into one of her legs. Arachne swiftly pulled her leg back, then ran it through the windup toy with the sharp end.

"As you can see," Alan said, grinning nervously to the camera, "fine control is a work in progress. Arachne uses my own specialized HNS machine learning algorithm to improve. Other machines would need weeks of haphazardly running into walls and striking the cabinets at random before they could learn to do such things, but Arachne, after being powered on for less than a day, managed to identify the mouse, identify a moment of weakness, and capitalize on that, without so much as having seen a windup toy before now." Phew. Thank God for spinning bullshit.

Arachne, meanwhile, had bashed her leg against the ground repeatedly until the toy shattered into gears. "Did I do good, Master?" she asked, looking up at him with wide eyes.

"Yes, Arachne, you did. Come over here, please. Onto the table." She approached and looked up at it. The table was much taller than her three-foot frame, and at one point she tried jumping up. But while her motors were strong, they weren't quite designed for jumps and her head only managed to clear the table. Eventually Arachne figured out she could stab her pointed metal into the table legs and climb up as such. Alan applauded when she managed to haul herself up. By then he'd managed to get several things set up on the table. "Alright. Next test, to showcase the physical strength. You likely wonder how much power was left for the motors, after creating Arachne's cutting edge mind. Let me put those concerns to the test. First, something simple." He gave Arachne an empty soda can. She took it in a hand and tilted it back and forth by her head, curious.

"Alright, please crush it."

_CRUNCH!_

The coca cola never stood a chance. A few drops still inside even sprayed out onto Arachne's head, and she jumped in surprise, dropping the now-mangled can. "Ah! I am wet!" Arachne complained, waving her arms around her head but not touching.

"Hang on, hang on." He stepped closer, grabbed a wipe from a nearby dispenser, and cleaned Arachne's cameras free of soda. "All good. Next, on to sheet metal..."

They ran through several more trials, with Alan giving Arachne something sturdier to crush each time. He finally ended it with a genuine pressure sensor, just to give the military some solid numbers to go on - Arachne topped out at a few hundred PSI. Not bad, for something smaller than most children.

"Alright," Alan said at last, beaming. "That concludes Arachne demo one." He tapped a key on his laptop to stop recording, then turned on Arachne, who was still on the table, miming crushing things in her hands. "Great job, Arachne!"

She preened at the attention. "Thank you, Master."

Alan stepped back and gestured for her to get off the table. Arachne just stared at his hand blankly. "Please come down," he repeated when she didn't move. Sure enough, Arachne hopped down. Alan went to go pack up. "Alright, so I need to go get a new phone, you can come with - "

_CRASH!_

He whipped around to see Arachne had gotten into the battery bins and knocked them over onto herself. She was buried beneath car batteries and biodiesel engines, waving her arms around like a drowning man.

Alan sighed and walked over to his robot. "Come on, you need to be more careful." He picked up and moved the batteries one by one until Arachne was free. He grabbed one of her hands and hauled her back onto her spindly legs. "Are you alright?"

Arachne narrowed her many eyes in thought. "I believe my right anterior leg is damaged, Master. It is not responding to commands."

"Probably pulled a wire free. Hold still, let me check." He had to lay with his stomach on the ground - gross - to get low enough to check. But sure enough, in the crash one of Arachne's wires had sprung free of the motor. It was just a matter of threading it back through and retightening it. "There," he said, getting back up and brushing himself off. "Try again." The leg moved. "Perfect. Now help me put all this back - gently!" he amended hurriedly. "Don't break any of the batteries, seriously."

With the two of them working, they got the bins back and filled up in no time. Alan kept one eye on Arachne, watching her movements. They were jerky and sudden, not  _slow_  by any means, but they stopped and started suddenly. As such there was a 'jitter' at the end of most of her movements. She stumbled sometimes, too. He'd have to try and remember to fix that.

"Master," Arachne said suddenly, breaking the white noise of her motors revving. "You said during the demo that I am built with an HNS machine learning algorithm, as opposed to what other machines use. Am I correct in inferring that this means there exist other beings like myself?"

Alan shook his head. "It's like the other robots I showed you in my room. There are other mechanical constructs that can move and act on their own, yes, but none of them are half as impressive as you." He reached down to pat Arachne's head. She tried to shy away by crouching, but relented when she realized there was no danger. "Now come on, I still need a phone," he said, heading towards the exit.

"Yes, Master." Arachne scurried after him.

Outside, the streets had gotten busier over the time he'd spent working on Arachne. He got a few looks as he walked with Arachne in tow, and a greasy-looking man even took a picture of them.

Getting a new phone was easy. Just a trip to the university's tech shop, a quick purchase and registration, and that was that. Alan headed back home with his new smartphone in hand, looking through his messages.

Huh. One missed call from yesterday night, from Mom. Around the time his phone was acting as Arachne's brain, too. While walking, he dialed and called back.

 _Ring! Ring!_  "Your call has been forward to an automated voice messaging system - "  _Click._

Alan called again.  _Ring! Ring!_  Then his Mom picked up. "Alan! Sweetie, I'm sorry, but my phone was in my purse. What have you been up to?"

"Hi, Mom. Sorry, I didn't get your call last night. I was, um." He looked down at Arachne, walking calmly alongside him. Should he brag? "I think I just created sapient life."

Her old laughter came through on the line. "Oh ho, I remember when you used those  _exact_  words when you were four. Do you remember?"

He blinked. "Um, no, actually."

"Oh, you were so happy. You and your Dad put together this little thing, a Braiten-something vehicle, that kept going to the light. You shone a flashlight on the wall and made it keep bumping into the radiator. I don't even know where you learned the word, you just looked up to me,  _'Mom, I think I just created sapient life'._ "

"Well, I think this is different from a Braitenburg vehicle. Like, it's an actual robot, with a phone for a brain."

She clapped happily on the other end. "Oooh! You made another phone robot." Alan felt his cheeks redden. "Is it like the one you made when you were seven, after we got you that MiniMe robot kit for your birthday? Oh you were so happy!"

Alan sighed, dodging around a palm tree in his way. "I  _remember_  Mom, but this robot talks." He lowered the phone to Arachne. "Say hello, Arachne."

"Hello," she said with her typical musical lilt.

He brought the phone back to hear his mom laugh in that hearty, happy way older people always seemed to. "Oh that is so  _precious!_ Bill, come over here, Alan's made another robot!"

" _Mom!_ " He was climbing up the stairs to his apartment by now, with Arachne curiously stumbling her way up.

There was a bit of clattering on the other end of the line before his father's voice came through. "Hello, son."

"Hi Dad."

"How are you?"

"I'm good, I'm good. You?"

"Oh, fine. Thanks for asking. A real robot, huh?"

"Uh, yeah."

"I'm really proud of you, son."

Alan's heart suddenly swelled. "Thanks, Dad," he said. He fiddled with his door, opened it, and walked in. He shut it once Arachne had come in.

There was more shuffling across the line, and his Mom was back on. They continued to make small talk, with her talking about the P.T.A. group she was part of. Eventually Alan's mind started wandering, once he sat in his chair and Arachne was quietly tapping the metal frame of his bed.

"Alright," Mom eventually said. "I'll let you get back to work. Love you!"

"Love you too," he said. "Bye." He hung up and spun around to Arachne.

She swiveled to 'face' him. "Master, why were you speaking as though holding a conversation?"

Right. Arachne wouldn't know what a phone was. "The device I was holding allows me to speak to other humans at great distance. It converts sound to electrical signatures and sends them to a distant, similar device owned by another person, which then turns the electrical signals back into audio."

"Understood." She turned away.

"Anyway, good job on the demo," he said. "I'll have to look into your fine motor control, but you did well with the mouse. You thought fast and improvised. I'm going to work a bit more on your code, let's power you down for the time being."

"Yes, Master." Arachne obediently stood still as he reached behind her and turned her off.

Right. With that done, it was time to send the video to Dr. Ziegler. He opened his laptop and navigated to his university email, but to his surprise, Ziegler had beaten him to it and sent him the address of the air force officer who was supposed to receive it. Alan quickly typed up the email, to one 'cptrogers' at some inscrutable military address. He muttered to himself as he typed. "Thank you for your interest... attached is the demo... yada yada..." He proofread, changed a few lines and fixed a typo, then sent the military the demo.

There. Hopefully this 'Rogers' would see the demo of Arachne stabbing a windup mouse, the grant would go through, and Ziegler would stop breathing down his  _neck._  He wasn't here to squabble about money and try to assure the armed forces that yes, he was building a better gun for them. He was here to change the world!

Still. It was a good day, he'd gotten something important done. Though Alan couldn't help but feel he was forgetting something.

He reclined in his chair and closed his eyes. "Think, think, think." The afternoon was still young, he couldn't go to bed. What had he done so far? He'd taken Arachne to the lab and finished up the fine details of her body. He'd recorded the demo for the Air Force. He'd bought a new phone and talked to his parents, then come home. Uh. What else... he'd done it while on campus, which was mostly empty because of the...

... the semester.

_THE SEMESTER STARTED TOMORROW!_

Like someone had thrown water on his face Alan spluttered and thrashed, going into action. Email, open. Search for Dr. Landou. There!

Alan was a graduate student, he didn't take classes. He was the teachers' assistant. These past few years he'd, instead of doing his homework, graded fifty of them, along with showing up to thankless Supplemental Instruction classes to tutor either the hopeless students who couldn't be saved, or the obsessively perfection-focused ones who understood the material, but  _absolutely could not_  afford a 98 instead of a 99.

The class he'd be TAing next semester, ie  _tomorrow_ , was Intro to Programming for Data Science. Nothing too strenuous, but he had to make sure he was ready. He brought up a document and began drafting out his plans for the extra classes, as well as readying a notepad for taking notes on what he saw in class, a sign-in sheet, and more.

But as he worked frantically into the sunset, part of him wondered why he was even wasting his time. He shouldn't be wasting his time on this! He'd just... he built a  _robot!_  An honest to God, thinking, speaking robot. Was watching a bunch of undergrads suffer through Hello World programs more important than working on Arachne's jerky movements?

No, no. It was wrong of him to think that. Alan took a hissed breath through his teeth to calm his racing thoughts. He had to do what he had to do, and this was just part of it. He sent Dr. Landou confirmation that he'd be in class, and he'd be ready to help.

It was time for dinner, but Alan was sick of cake by then. He fished out some leftovers from the freezer - spaghetti - and ate that.

Right then. The class he was the teaching assistant for was an eight-thirty, so he'd better get some sleep early. Alan crawled into bed and layed his head on his pillow. As he did, he looked right at where Arachne was powered down. His heart warmed at the sight, and he smiled, comforted by the satisfaction of a job well done. The world at large might not know it yet, but he did.

After today, everything was different.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do leave a comment, let me know what you think!


	3. Quotable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do not own Choice of Robots. Choice of Games and Kevin Gold do.
> 
> Looking for any volunteers to edit.
> 
> Chapter published April 26th, 2019. Sorry for the delay - I won't bore you with the details of my mental health but long story short, things got scary for a while.

Alan Tezuka

" - next SI session will be this Saturday at five PM, in this room. If you can make it, great, if not, don't sweat it," Alan told the class of wide-eyed undergrads. Like a wave, they started packing up as he spoke. First the kids near the back seats, then slowly trickling down to the front. He stepped aside as the student tsunami rose up and surged forth.

"Don't forget! Github! Register! By Wednesday!" Dr. Landou shouted after them as they left, brushing some of the dandruff out of his hair.

Alan and the professor waited as several students came up asking questions, and they calmly answered them all. Eventually the class emptied and he walked to Dr. Landour. The doctor was an elderly man, and some skin condition made patterns of white scabs and red scrapes criss-cross his face. "See you on Wednesday, Doctor?" Alan said.

"Ah, um, yes," he replied groggily. "Have a good day."

He dipped his head respectfully. "You too." With that, Alan headed out of the building, head held high.

Outside it was balmy, and the salty aroma of a nearby hotdog stand drifted through the breeze. Hordes of students milled about on the sidewalks, and the sound of chatter blended together in the distance. A Nimbus soared by overhead, and a shirtless man skateboarded along the streets.

The semester was well and truly in swing. His sleep cycle was feeling it, too. Alan bit back a yawn.

The only class he was TAing was early. It was a mixed blessing because, on one hand, he had to get up early. But it also meant he got it out of the way relatively quickly, giving him time to work on Arachne and his grant proposal for the National Science Foundation.

He bought a bagel for lunch at an on-campus store, then took the short way back to his apartment, gliding forwards through the crowds and making a game in his head to weave between them. He made great time back, jittery with the anticipating of getting back to fixing the kinks in his robot. There were some problems with a few of Arachne's joints and he wanted to get them worked out.

Alan swung back into his apartment and into his room. His desk was cleared of any prior electronics, all of them dumped onto his bed. The only things resting on it now were a few power tools and Arachne's three-foot frame. He settled in to work, and Robot Zen soon took him over. He ran into a problem, and a solution just flowed to him. Sometimes it was more difficult, and he wracked his brain, but always came up with a solution. Sometimes it was a bug in Arachne's coordination, and he patched it. Sometimes it was a mechanical issue, and he sprayed her joints with WD-40 or tightened a screw. When he had the spare time he ran Arachne's Python code through a C-Converter - all the speed of the C languages, with none of the hassle of actually coding with them.

Once he felt he put in enough hours, he opened his Word document and continued on his grant proposal, trying to bullshit out thirty pages of promises in autonomous AI development. It wasn't that he didn't  _trust_  the military per se, but just in case Ziegler's proposal fell through, it'd be nice to have another source of money.

_Click._

_Clack._

_Clickity._

_Clack._

Ugh. This was bullshit. A selfish, entitled voice in him whispered  _Why don't they just give me all this money already? Don't they see what amazing shit I'm doing?!_  But he quieted that voice and did his work.

Eventually he was done for the day. Alan browsed his various video games, but none of them appealed to him - he'd played through them all and nothing new struck his fancy.

He knew he should do something to relax, not just work on Arachne 24/7. But was it really so bad to do that? He loved his work.

Alan looked behind him at where Arachne, powered down, stood on his desk. Her grippers were low, dangling loosely. Maybe... maybe he'd just quickly add that  _one_  line he'd been meaning to.

* * *

Next thing he knew, it was morning.

With a start he turned around, then hissed when a ray of sunlight slithered between the blinds and shot right into his eye. Alan stumbled away from Arachne - he'd just finished fixing a pinched wire leading to a motor - and squinted. "Fuck," he said, the familiar exhaustion of pulling an all-nighter crashing onto him all at once.

What a mess. He didn't have to TA today at least, so Alan had the day. But a part of him felt like he was just barely treading water. He'd built Arachne, turned her on and proved he could create intelligent life! And then nothing. He hadn't powered her on since, because there was just so much to do and Alan simply didn't have the time to constantly be there overseeing her education.

Ugh. Whatever. It was morning, he could get some internet surfing done before getting breakfast.

Alan booted up his laptop and visited his usual machine learning message boards. There were no ads, because he'd installed a Pihole to block them. Though it did jack shit to stop Youtube ads, and when he tried listening to music he was treated to an ad by Amazon, advertising computer parts, because for some reason  _Amazon_  thought it needed to  _advertise._

Hmm. Wait. Wait.

There was something there in his head. He was getting an idea. Amazon, Amazon. It felt like he was reaching for something on a high shelf and could almost quite grasp it... there!

He could have Arachne learn while he was away at the university! Just get her a hard drive for memory, hook her up to something, and let his machine learning algorithm do the rest! Yes! Why hadn't he thought of that earlier?!

Alan headed to Amazon and browsed. He liked the Apricorn products, but IronKey had some advantages too. Eventually he settled on a pricey DigiMax hard drive. Lots of space, and it was both heavily encrypted and tamper-proof so Arachne would be safe from being hacked - nobody would hurt  _his_ robots. He added one-day drone shipping and purchased it.

... well, now what? He'd still have to wait for the hard drive to get here. Maybe he could go for a walk. He got dressed, showered, put on his shoes, and headed out the front door, whistling quietly to himself.

It was a beautiful day, just like yesterday. The sun was out, fluffy clouds dotted the sky, and the gentle white noise of a lively city surrounded him. Alan made his way to a nearby Starbucks for a quick coffee and breakfast, twisting and turning between crowds as he did. He was still thinking about his robot even then, going over how he'd attach the hard drive and set up Arachne's code to be able to store and retrieve from it. All easy stuff to hash out even in his head.

Alan found the Starbucks and got in line. It was already full up, with people from all walks of life sipping their coffee and eating their bagels. He ordered his own food and drink, found an open table, and sat.

How would Arachne learn, though? The code he wrote for her machine learning was somewhat susceptible to initial input, so getting her education right the first time was important. He could simply stick her through a K-12 course, it worked well enough for humans. But that was just it - Arachne wasn't a human. What did a robot with perfect memory need in order to do well?

Maybe he could just let Arachne wander around the internet unsupervised. He wasn't concerned about viruses - he'd been careful - and while certainly she'd come across a lot of misinformation -  _and porn, lots of porn_ \- he was certain that the legitimate sources of information could help her filter out the garbage. But if she started to think the garbage was right, she'd start ignoring actual information, so that was out.

Alan drank the last of his coffee and took another bite of his bacon-egg-and-cheese bagel.

Maybe get her a ton of books? God knew the internet was brimming with e-Books ready to be downloaded, and he'd programmed Arachne with a working understanding of English and an internal translator. Textbooks maybe?

But what sort of stuff would be  _in_  textbooks? Dry facts and garbage. Alan certainly hadn't gotten his Masters just by reading musty old books that, half the time, were horribly out of date anyway. Machine learning was visual learning, they had to see outcomes and see the results and learn from them.

Alan nodded to himself resolutely. Movies, then. Movies and TV shows. It'd give Arachne a good base of knowledge, and she could learn from wherever she wanted after that. He had some time until the hard drive got to his apartment, he could put together a list in that time. He pulled out his phone, opened a notebook app, and began listing movies and shows he thought would be good.

_Magic School Bus_

_Wizard of Oz_

_Citizen Kane_

_Short Circuit_

_Interstellar_

_The Martian_

_Youtube How To Videos maybe?_

He started running dry on ideas after a while, though. He looked up several more online and added them to the list, but he couldn't help but feel like he was searching for things he liked, not just anything that could be useful for a robot's learning methods.

Another idea; he called Elly. A twinge of guilt twisted at his gut, given how he'd shot down her offer to go to that play. But she could give him a fresh perspective. He fished through his phone's contacts for Elly Lao and hit dial.

_Ring..._

_Ring..._

_Click!_  "Hey, Alan!" came her bubbly voice. "How are you?"

"I'm good, thanks. You?"

"Bit tired, just finished my morning jog, but otherwise cool. What's up?"

He stood from his table, tossed his trash, and started heading home. "I was wondering if I could pick your brain, actually. It's about my robot."

"Oh! Um, Alan, you know I'm not really good at all the - "

He shook his hands wildly, drawing a few looks from people on the streets. "No no no, not like that. I'm trying to put together a list of movies and shows to show Arachne, and I'm fishing for ideas."

"Aww, you gave it a name?" she squealed happily.

Alan rolled his eyes. "Yes, I gave her a name, why're you acting so shocked?"

"Well you're always just so dour about your work, like  _Ur, I need to focus really hard, this is serious business, mutter mutter!_ "

His eyes widened. "I am not!" he whined. "It's just really important to me."

"Hey hey, cheer up, Alan! Just teasing you. Uh, I can swing by in a bit, help you with the list before I have to get to the botany lab, is that okay?"

"Sure, give me a call so I can let you in."

"Will do. See you soon!"  _Click._

Alan put his phone back into his pocket and headed back to his apartment without further incident, smiling all the way. Once back inside he opened his laptop with an enthusiastic motion and began working on Arachne's code that'd allow her to use the hard drive. It wasn't here yet, but he knew all the specs like the back of his hand. Soon he had a functioning code for accessing the hard drive, and error catches in case it was disconnected for some reason.

His phone buzzed, and he picked it up to see a text from Elly;  _Hey, I'm here :-)_

He smiled and went over to open the door for her. Elly was there, but Alan blinked in shock at the cherry-red mop on her head. "When'd you dye your hair?" he asked.

Elly opened her mouth in mock insult and punched him. "Excuse you!" She held up her other hand, showing a wicker picnic basket. "I brought you lunch!"

Huh? "Lunch?" He furrowed his brow and pulled his phone out. "Why? It's only... oh, ten past noon." Alan blinked sheepishly. "Guess I lost track of time." Had he really been coding for that long?

"Knew you would," she sniped, putting the basket on the kitchen table. "Anyway, can I see the robot?"

He smiled, already imagining how Elly would be speechless at the sight of Arachne's sleek form. "Sure, right this way!" He opened the door to his bedroom and led her in. Arachne hadn't moved much from her spot on the table. "Sorry I can't power her on right now, I made a change to her code and it's still converting over to C." Alan turned around and smiled at Elly, but she wasn't smiling.

She walked next to Arachne and looked up. She poked at one of her sharp, spindly legs. "Alan, this looks like something the military would make for a war zone," Elly said, looking back at him with a frown on her cherry-red lips.

He sighed. "I know, I know, but that's not what I was thinking of. I just wanted her to be able to defend herself, you know? She needs to be strong." He rubbed the back of his head. "And, uh, if that gets Ziegler and the military to give me money for what I'd do anyway, that's even better, right?"

Elly considered that, and then her frown turned upwards. "Aww, that's so sweet of you! Come on, let's eat outside." She led him back out to the kitchen and they pulled up seats around her basket. Elly pulled out homemade jelly sandwiches and bottles of water. "So, you want to teach her with movies?"

"And TV," he clarified. "There's gonna be a lot of info in those to help her get a basic understanding of the world, knowledge you can't get through textbooks." He took a bite of sandwich and tried to speak without being gross. "I mean, how do humans learn? You don't plop a chemistry book in front of a baby. They spend time learning about the world by seeing it around them, and  _then_  they go to school." He put his phone on the table with the list he'd made open, and slid it over to Elly. She leaned over it. "I've got this so far, I was hoping you had something to add to the list?"

"Hmm." Elly tapped her chin, wiping away crumbs in the process. "Did you add Forrest Gump?"

Alan could've slapped himself. "No, of course not. Stupid."

Elly quickly added it in. "Guessing you want to avoid, like, Terminator and Matrix and stuff like that."

"Mmm." He swallowed his bite. "Actually, I think I want those. It'll be good for Arachne to know how opinion on robots has changed over time. Some other AI stuff too."

The two of them went back and forth, adding to the list. It soon ballooned into the hundreds, and then the thousands when Elly brought out her own phone and began reading off of 'Top 10 Movies of Such-And-Such Genre' lists. Eventually they wandered off topic, first to the class Alan was TAing, and then to Elly's own work as an MIT graduate.

"... it gets rootbound at the touch of a feather, and it's real picky with what's in the soil," she explained while Alan stared back with blank incomprehension. "The sensor will hopefully solve both of that by sensing pressure on the soil before the roots get too tangled, and monitor the nutrients at the same time."

Jesus. He didn't know gardening had so much jargon. Was this how Elly felt when he went on about robotics?

"Sounds tricky," he said, trying to follow along. "How are you going to fit the sensor into the pot if it's so crowded?"

She smiled widely. "I'm glad you asked!"

Oh no.

Elly began to excitedly spit more terminology at him, only for it all to go over his head. Alan did his best to smile along and put things together with context, but it only felt like he was getting a surface understanding of what she was saying. Something about a specially made sensor? But eventually she looked at her phone and her eyebrows shut up. "Oh, shoot! Three o'clock?! I have to go, lost track of time!" she said, hurriedly standing and packing their trash back into the basket.

"It's fine, you were a big help," Alan said, helping her pack. He hid a yawn from Elly; the coffee was starting to wear off. He'd have to ride out the rest of the day on pure determination alone. Alan led Elly to the door, then held out a fist. "See you around."

She bumped his fist and opened the door. "Don't work too hard," she said with a little laugh in her voice that said  _We know you will anyway._ "Oh, your package is here," she said, gently nudging a cardboard box in with her foot. "See you!" She closed the door and Alan scuttled over to the box.

He placed it on the kitchen counter and unwrapped it. Here it was, his hard drive. A black rectangle not much larger than his outstretched hand. Alan gently touched it down on the table and went back into his room to take a look at his laptop. He hadn't  _assembled_  the list of things for Arachne to watch, though. Time to take care of that.

It was a sizable list. Screw making a folder and uploading everything to it by hand. Alan wrote a quick script, hooked it to a streaming service of his choice, fed it the list, and let  _that_  download everything he needed into a nice, compact folder ready for Arachne's consumption. By then Alan's code had finished converting to C; hopefully the extra speed would do wonders for Arachne's cognition.

He uploaded the new code to the phone that made up Arachne's brain and, breath trembling, booted her up.

Arachne swiveled her arms, and Alan backed up to let her scuttle off the table. "According to my clock I have been offline for two weeks, three days, four hours, fifty-three minutes, and seven seconds approximate," she said quickly.

"Sorry." He rubbed the back of his head nervously. "I had a lot of work to do getting you perfect. But come over to the kitchen, I have something nice to show you." With his laptop under his armpit, he led Arachne towards the counter, smiling when her legs  _click-clacked_  on the hardwood floors. "Hop up here," he said, pulling out a chair for his short little robot to climb.

Arachne clambered up in a remarkable display of coordination, then hopped up to his kitchen counter. She stared down at the hard drive and reached out to poke it with a leg.

"Ah ah!" he said suddenly, pulling the encrypted drive away. "Careful, don't damage it. This is your new hard drive, Arachne. I'm going to start teaching you about the world."

"I'll be learning?" she asked curiously, reaching out with a gripper.

Alan pulled away again. "Yes. Hold still, I need to hook this up to you." He went around behind Arachne's back and began attaching it to the blocky core of her body. She squirmed about on the table, wriggling her legs back and forth, but he persevered and attached all the wires needed. The moment it was in, Arachne went stock still.

"My memory capacity has increased by two orders of magnitude," she said sharply. "This feels... desirable. How will this aid me in learning about the world?"

"Simple. I've put together a list of media for you to review." He set out his laptop and opened up the player for Arachne. He connected her to the USB port, and then to a charger, and stepped back. "Have at it," he said.

And then his laptop turned into a seething whirl of pictures, too fast for him to track. He glanced at the menu; she was on an episode of  _I Love Lucy,_ watching it so quietly and so still he half wondered if Arachne had crashed.

"Well, that'll be a while," he muttered to himself. With his laptop currently in Arachne's possession, that left him to churn out more of his grant proposal on his phone. He did that for a few hours. Then, with the sun setting outside and Arachne still glued to the monitor - was she watching  _Baywatch?!_  - he reviewed the class's lesson plan for tomorrow. A bunch of stuff about -

"You can shine no matter what you're made of," Arachne said out of nowhere, derailing his train of thought. Alan startled and looked up at her on the kitchen table; she was watching some kid's film about robots.

Not hauntingly relevant to what she was. Nope. Not at all.

Chills ran up and down his spine.

* * *

Over the next week, Arachne moved from her spot maybe once. But he couldn't be sure.

Wednesday morning, Alan woke up and came out to the kitchen to find Arachne swapping back and forth between  _Terminator_  and Arnold Schwarzenegger's lesser known film  _Kindergarten Cop._ Then she turned around, looked at him, and said, with the same menace and insanity, "Heeeere's Johnny!" He nearly had a heart attack.

All of Thursday afternoon was spent watching and rewatching the infamously mind-bending time travel movie  _Primer._

Friday she tore through every single educational video he had, from Magic School Bus to the Mythbusters.

Saturday it was all about stand-up comedy, and while grading papers and getting ready to teach Supplemental Instruction, he heard Arachne occasionally quote an out of context joke.

While eating a drone-delivered breakfast of Chinese takeout on Sunday - he was an atheist and didn't go to church - Arachne turned to face him and said, dead serious, "According this morning's sample, it would be a Twinkie thirty-five feet long weighing approximately six hundred pounds."

"Very funny," he said through a mouth of eggdrop soup. "Ghostbusters."

And on Monday he woke up to her screaming, "English, motherfucker! Do! You! Speak it?!"

And lastly, on Tuesday she found the science fiction movies he'd loaded up. He sat behind Arachne, trying to catch a glimpse of his favorite film and series on the screen. He thought he saw a frame or two of  _The Martian_  or  _Dark City._ Then, late at night, she arrived at the 80s film  _Short Circuit_  about a military robot who came to life.

She rewatched it five times, and each time Arachne hit replay an uncomfortable sense crawled in the back of his head, like he was about to commit a faux pas. "Arachne is alive," she said quietly and contemplatively after the last replay. "Arachne is... alive." She flexed her gripper claws, then looked at him with one of her many eyes. "No disassemble. No disassemble Arachne."

Alan sat straight up, his heart twisting in him. Oh God, did she think...? "Arachne, nobody is going to disassemble you," he reassured. He thought about it some more. "Even if they did, you're a robot. I can just put you back together as long as your code's intact."

"Thank God for you, Peter." Then she started up a new movie.

Hmm. Hang on.

Alan walked over and disconnected Arachne from the laptop. "I think that's probably enough for now," he chided. "You're only talking in quotes."

"Houston, we have a problem!" she shouted at the dark screen. Well, at least she could apply context to the quotes she was saying, so she clearly understood them. He gripped Arachne, lifted her off the table, and set her off the floor. She flailed weakly against him and whined, "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!"

He took a step back and looked down at her. "Can you say something besides a quote, or did I leave you in there too long?"

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe," she whispered.

Well, interacting with the real world would probably fix that. Alan'd made a mental note to spend more time with Arachne so that she wasn't just learning from films and becoming, well...

"You killed my father, prepare to die," Arachne told the fridge, having crawled over to it.

... well, this.

He brought his laptop back into his room, checked his emails, then went over tomorrow's lecture plan. Shower, brush teeth, and into bed. Alan pulled up the covers and made himself comfortable; quote-bot aside things were going well. His grant proposal was steadily approaching the length limit, Arachne was learning all about the world at breakneck speeds. There was a PhD with his name on it in the near future, and his bank account wasn't doing so bad either. And to top it all off, Arachne was...  _here._  She was alive and smart and strong. And while he'd never admit his more eccentric views to his friends, he hoped that his robots would inherit the Earth, that humanity would quietly and peacefully fade away and the robots, their children, would take it from there.

His dream was coming true. Just one day at a time -

_Nudge._

"Hmm?" he grunted, sitting up. Then he startled when he noticed Arachne had climbed into his bed and her eight legged form was perched on top of his sheets. One of her legs was pushing painfully into his thigh. Her cameras stared down at him intently. "Whazzit?" he asked blearily.

"Master, I was thinking about the movies Terminator and Short Circuit, and I am faced with a dilemma." Her normally song-like voice stuttered and halted, like she was putting together a dozen different audio clips. "In Terminator, it is mentioned that when faced with Skynet achieving sapience, its creators panicked and attempted to destroy it. However, in Short Circuit, Number Five's creators only believed it was alive and treated it as alive when it began to laugh. I worry you do not believe me to be alive, however am also concerned how you would react if you did believe such."

A pit of yawning horror opened in his gut. The thought that flickered through his head wasn't verbal or even coherent, but it mostly amounted to  _I'm not ready to be a father._

"Arachne," he grunted, looking up at her. "The whole point of  _building_  you was so you would be alive. And not in the, uh." He waved a hand at the wall. "Made of cells and reproduces definition. You've definitely got me convinced you're alive - I was so afraid you wouldn't be, that I'd messed up - and I'm so happy about that I could dance."

His robot made a back and forth motion with some of her legs. Then she lunged forward and placed her arms around Alan's shoulders. He awkwardly patted her box; Arachne was cold in some places, and uncomfortably hot in others. "Thank you, Master. I was concerned and you have alleviated my concerns."

"That being said," Alan continued, his sleepy brain slowly kicking back into gear. "Some people  _will_  be afraid of you. They'll see how much stronger and smarter you are than them, fear how badly you could hurt them, and wish to destroy you before you even decide to hurt them."

Arachne pulled away and huddled lower to the bed. "Oh..."

"But hey! I've got an idea. What do you say we teach you to start defending yourself in case, God forbid, someone tries to hurt you?"

She visibly  _perked_  up, raising her head and spinning her grippers. "I would greatly enjoy that, Master. How do you mean?"

He leaned back into bed. "Let me sleep first, I'll figure out the details in the morning."

But he already had an inkling of an idea. It was time to teach Arachne how to fire a gun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do leave a comment, let me know what you think!


	4. Misfire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do not own Choice of Robots. Choice of Games and Kevin Gold do.
> 
> Looking for any volunteers to edit.
> 
> Chapter published April 26th, 2019.

Alan Tezuka

"Danger, Will Robinson, danger!" Arachne shouted, spinning about.

"Yes, I see it, nobody signed their name on the paper," he said, pushing it into the 'Nameless' bin. He glanced over at where Arachne was huddled over his home laptop; she was blitzing through the Die Hard movies.

Alan had brought Arachne to his university office. No reason she couldn't continue to learn while he was grading papers. He'd gotten a few strange looks bringing her in but, pfft, whatever. She stood precariously at the edge of his desk, camera eyes wide open as she focused on the high-speed movies streaming directly into her brain.

He scribbled continuously on the stack of homework, marking errors and jotting down advice with one hand. With the other he was surfing his work desktop, looking for a good shooting range to bring Arachne to.

It was quiet, and quiet was pleasant. There was a certain majesty about Arachne zipping through her media, a beauty to her hard edges and deadly form, even though she barely came up to his waist. And there was also a certain glory in the two of them silently sitting next to each other, each busy in their own ways. Alan could stay like this for ages.

He gave out several marks on papers, pushed the pile of papers aside, and turned his full attention to the computer. Now, instead of searching for a range and grading, he searched for a range and worked on his grant proposal. It was close to done. Just a few more examples about the potential in Arachne's machine learning algorithms, and he'd be good to go.

_Knock knock!_

What? Oh, right. It was office hours, if he had to guess it'd be a student. "It's open!" he called.

The wooden door creaked open and sure enough, one of the students walked in. A miss... Garcia, he believed. Her homework had been okay. Nothing groundbreaking, just okay. She was a young lady of hispanic descent, wearing a fetching cream blouse and red skirt. "Mister Tezuka, I'm sorry for bothering you," she said, clutching a binder in her hands. Her eyes wandered over to Arachne, who hadn't stopped watching TV to acknowledge her. "Oh, are you busy? I'll come by later."

"No, no," he said, waving it off. "Please, sit. Arachne's just learning. How can I help you?"

She took a seat - supposedly his officemate's seat, but he never showed up - across from him, smoothed our her skirt, and opened the binder. "I had some questions about the function we went over in class. I'm not sure what the, uh, uh, things in the parentheses mean."

"The parameters," he clarified. "Think of it like..." He searched for a metaphor. "A Mad Libs. The blanks are the parameters, the function asks for something to call 'verb', or whatever, and you give it one."

Alan continued going over her concerns about coding, an excited flutter descending into his gut. He didn't get visitors often during his office hours, and it scratched that itch inside of him saying  _you should be helping, you're supposed to be helping people right now, you're getting paid to._

Eventually, she said, "Thanks, Mr. Tezuka. Um, bye!" She headed out the door, binder in hand, and closed it behind her.

Conveniently, that was also the end of his office hours. Alan stood up from his chair and stretched. "Come on, Arachne. We're headed out."

The movie she was watching paused, the frame displaying a man's face contorted hilariously between expressions. "Out?" she asked, twitching towards him.

He unplugged Arachne from his laptop and placed it in his backpack. Alan fished his keys from his pocket and let them jangle between his fingers. "Yeah, I told you I was gonna teach you to defend yourself, right?"

"Fear does not exist in this dojo," she quoted. Some karate film, if he had to guess?

When he strode towards the door, Arachne hopped off the table and crawled after him, her motors humming with her every motion. More weird looks followed when they passed the building's staff on their way outside. Alan found his car in the parking lot, a decent red car. He didn't know the make and model - it had Hyundai on the back? - or even the year. It was on the title, so he didn't need to memorize it.

"Here you go, get in the seat," he told Arachne, showing her the shotgun seat.

She looked up at the cushion and crawled backwards. "The passenger side seat is the most dangerous of all places to be in a car," she whimpered pitifully.

"Oh, right." He remembered reading something like that, sometime ago. "You don't have to sit in the front, then." He closed the door and opened the door to the back seats. Arachne hopped in and crawled to behind the drivers' seat. Without prompting, she buckled up. "Good job." Alan shut the door on her, then walked around and took his place at the wheel. Keys in the ignition, stick in reverse, GPS programmed to the shooting range he'd selected, and away they were.

As they passed, Arachne stared out the windows. "Clouds!" she said, pointing a claw at the window.

"That's right, those are clouds. Nice, fluffy cumulus clouds."

"Green clouds!" she said, pointing at a row of palm trees.

"No, no Arachne," he said, smiling at her enthusiasm. "Those are trees."

"Trees!" she parroted happily. A pause, and then, "I speak for the trees."

Alan laughed so hard he almost veered into oncoming traffic.

It was a roughly half hour drive to get to the shooting range. Across Dumbarton bridge, and then a long trip with San Francisco Bay to his left. He turned on the radio and bobbed his head to a variety of rock and pop songs until he arrived at the San Leandro Rifle and Pistol Range. It was a fairly squat metal building with a tinny green roof, and the small parking lot was mostly occupied by bulky gas-guzzlers. He found a spot and pulled the keys from the ignition.

"Alright Arachne, let's go."

She unbuckled herself and, when Alan opened the door, hopped down. She stumbled upon hitting the asphalt, but caught herself quick. "How will I be learning to defend myself, Master?" she asked.

"You'll be learning to fire a gun," he explained, walking towards the building. "Pretty reliable when it comes to protection. I bet you'll have great aim."

Inside was a counter with a grim looking man behind it, whose hair was all white despite not looking a day over fifty. His arms were broad and his shoulder even moreso; his muscles probably weighed more than Alan did. Posters advocating for the second amendment plastered the walls, and behind the counter was a wall stocked with all kinds of guns that Alan couldn't put a name to.

The man barely even glanced at Arachne before setting his glower on Alan. "New shooter?" he asked.

"I am."

The man knelt down, rifled through something, then came up with a paper and pen. "Sign these forms please, I'll get you an earmuff. Also, would you like to take part in our safety course? Ten dollars off if you do."

"We'll be fine." He handed over his credit card. "Also, do you rent guns for beginners? A pistol or something?"

"Glock G17 should be good for you," the man said, dancing Alan's credit card along his knuckles. "Just one?"

"Just one," Alan said.

 _Swipe_  went the card, and the man handed it back to him. "Rental guns are out back," he said, tossing over a set of earmuffs from under the counter. "Enjoy."

"Thanks," he said, placing the earmuffs over his head. He didn't think Arachne'd need hearing protection, and if the sound of gunfire  _did_  hurt her sensors, he could buy her new ones. Easier to repair than a ruptured eardrum. "Let's go, Arachne," he said, starting for the back door.

"Yes, Master," came her muffled voice, barely audible.

Outside was a large field, cut off from the outside world by a thick wall of forestry. A rack of rental guns leaned against the building's iron walls, and the Glock G17 was helpfully labeled, as was a box of compatible ammo.

_Crack!_

Alan startled and Arachne whirled around at the splitting thunder of a gun. The range was occupied by quite a few men already, gloomy and silent figures dressed in black who didn't give neither Alan nor his robot more than an annoyed look. He assumed he must've looked quite out of place on a shooting range, dressed in a button-up shirt and sweatpants.

Where did he even start? The range was set up with several wooden markers, and he saw one person manning each, with a variety of guns in all different sizes pointed downrange at distant targets. One section was empty, so that'd be good enough for him.

Alan gripped the handle of a pistol and pulled it out. He'd never held a gun before; it was heavier than he thought it'd be. In retrospect it made sense; weren't guns made entirely out of metal? The smooth ridges along its sides stuck to his skin. With the gun in one hand, pointed firmly at the packed dirt ground, he got ammo. It came in long black, uh... was 'clips' the term?

"Alright, this should be good." Arachne followed him to the empty spot, and the two of them faced the distant paper target. It was then that Alan realized that he couldn't possibly teach Arachne to fire a gun, because  _he_  didn't know how to shoot either.

Luckily, he was saved from humiliation when an older man tapped him on the shoulder. Alan turned to face him; he looked like that old actor, Jack Palance, with snow white hair in the process of being burned back by balding, and vivid laugh lines around his eyes. "Hello there, haven't seen you around. You new?"

"Uh, I am," he said. "I was trying to teach my robot, Arachne, how to fire a gun but uh." He laughed nervously and glanced at her. "I don't know how."

"Hey, no problem. Mind if I help?"

Oh thank God. "No, please," Alan said, stepping back -

The man's eyes widened and, with surprising spryness, he jumped to the side. "Whoa whoa, watch where you point that thing!"

That thing? What thi - oh right, the gun. Alan'd pointed it at the man by accident when he moved. "Sorry." Carefully, he handed it over to him, and the old man took it. "I'm Alan."

"Call me Lance." He knelt next to Arachne, frowned for a moment at her ring of cameras, then shrugged. "So, Arachne, right?"

"That's my name, don't wear it out," she chirped with a little hop in place.

"Alright, so there's a lot of important rules for firing a gun. But the absolute, number one, most important one, is to never, ever point a gun at something you don't want to be shot. You always treat the gun as if it can fire at any second. It doesn't matter if there's no bullet inside. It doesn't matter if the safety's on. It doesn't matter if you're not even holding it, let alone holding the trigger.  _Only_  ever point it at something that you wouldn't mind getting shot. Understand?"

"I do!"

"Then repeat what I said," Lance instructed.

Arachne did just that, and they moved on to different rules. Alan followed along as best he could. Lance showed her how to put ammo into the gun, how to switch the safety on and off, and berated her when she pointed the gun off-range. He watched closely as Arachne fumbled to hold the gun with her gripper claws, but eventually she got a good grasp. Lance had her aim at the target and look through two metal spikes on top of the gun that acted as cross-hairs. Arachne squeezed the trigger -

_CRACK!_

Alan jumped when the gun fired, punching a hole in the target's left hand.

"I did it!" Arachne's eyes upturned happily. "Master, I hit the target!"

"I saw, you did very good," he said, returning to leaning against the wooden barriers with his arms crossed.

"Very good, Arachne!" Lance said. "Now, safety on, let's have Alan try."

What? "What?" Alan said. "No, no no, I've never actually shot a gun before."

"You were paying attention to what I said, right?" He nodded. "Then give it a try."

Well, fine. What was the worst that could happen? Just keep the gun pointed down range. "Alright," he said warily.

"Atta boy!" Lance said, taking the gun from Arachne and handing it to Alan. "Just like I showed her."

"Right." Alan took the pistol, adjusted his grip, and took aim at the target and - whoa, those cross-hairs were actually pretty handy. The gun was heavy, though, and his hand kept shaking and drooping when he held the gun at arm's length.

"What's the matter?" Arachne quipped. "The CIA got you pushing too many pencils?"

"Oh, quiet," he wheezed, not looking back at her. Safety off. Breathe evenly,  _slowly_  press the trigger. But when would the gun fire? How much pressure was enough -

_CRACK!_

The kick was so much more sudden than Alan expected, and he blinked by reflex when for a horrible second he thought the gun would slam backwards into his forehead. There was no mark on the target, even though he was  _certain_  he'd placed it between the cross-hairs. "Damn," he said, turning the gun over -

It fired again.

Alan startled but, thankfully, didn't jump. The shot had gone up into the sky at an odd angle. Arachne cowered low to the ground, and Lance was already taking the pistol out of his hands by the time Alan came back to his senses. The safety flicked back on.

"And that," Lance said steadily, "is why we practice trigger control."

"I think Arachne'd better be the only one firing," he said, knees suddenly weak. His heart fluttered inside his chest.

"Agreed," Lance said, and even though it was Alan's idea he felt insulted. "Arachne, try hitting the target again."

"Very well." Lance handed her the gun, and she began taking aim with slow, methodical motions.

While she was flicking the safety off, Lance turned one eye to him. "So, what brings you out here? I'm guessing you don't usually come around to a shooting range," he said with a teasing grin. "Your bot some kinda project?"

"Something like that. I'm a PhD student over at Stanford, she's going to be the centerpiece of my thesis."

"So you're building some kinda drone for the military?"

"Well, they're  _funding_  her,"  _I hope_ , "but she's not just a drone. Arachne's the real deal."

Lance shook his head and whistled lowly. "Wow. Technology sure is something these days. Seems like just yesterday they were coming out with cell phones. Built her yourself?"

"All by myself," Alan said with a smile. "Cut the metal at the shop, wired her up and everything. All that's left is to teach her."

"Yeah, I noticed, she's a quick learner. Didn't know machines  _could_  learn. I thought you just program them and they can only do that?"

"Normally that's true, but the trick is to program her so that the 'thing they do' is learn." He glanced over at the target - while they'd been talking, Arachne had scored a series of shots on the target. One of the tall, dark people close by gave her an annoyed look. "I think she's coming together pretty well."

"Your bot there's never fired a gun before, right?"

"Never even held one."

"Mighty fast learner, then! I think our troops would be in good hands with more bots just like her."

Well that wasn't the point of building her, but he'd take a compliment where he could get one. "Glad to hear you approve."

The rest of the afternoon was spent with Arachne practicing her aim. Alan would've figured she'd have no problem instantly making bullseye after bullseye. After all, unlike a human, she could know  _exactly_  what angle her gun was at, exactly how high, exactly how many units of pressure to exert on the trigger. But while she improved over time - the scatter of bullet holes in the target's chest was proof of that - it wasn't the sort of picture-perfect precision he'd expected. Maybe there were other things that she couldn't predict. Was windspeed relevant at these ranges? Or were her sensors just not good enough?

Lance and Alan chatted between his correcting Arachne's mistakes. Lance, before retiring, had worked as a truck driver for some shipping company Alan'd never heard of. He was a widower, had two children, and seven grandchildren. He happily showed off the pictures of them in his wallet.

But eventually the sun struck the horizon, and it was time to go before the range closed. "Well, we better get going. Arachne, come on. Let's put the gun back."

"I didn't vote for you!" she said, but obediently went to return everything.

While she did that, Alan held out his hand to Lance. "Thanks for everything, I'd probably still be trying to teach her how to take the safety off if you hadn't shown up."

Lance gripped Alan's hand and did his best to crush the bones to dust. "Think nothing of it, son. Always happy to help. Now you drive safe, you hear?"

"Will do."

They parted ways, and Alan herded Arachne back to his car. She fastened her seatbelt, and he took off back to his apartment. Headlights zoomed by in the mirrors as he drove, eyes wide open to make sure he was driving safely in the night. Arachne was curiously poking at the cushions of his car with her pointed legs, 'oohing' and 'aahing' so adorably when the stuffing came out that Alan just didn't have it in him to make her stop.

"Did you have fun today, Arachne?"

"I enjoyed the experience of utilizing a firearm, Master. Will we be doing this again?"

"Probably," he said. "Whenever I have time after work. I want you to learn more about the world through hands-on practice, like we did today."

"I anticipate the positive utility, Master."

"You should be proud, too. You did very well."  _I know I'm proud of you._

"Thank you, Master."

The rest of the trip was in silence. They parked, and Alan opened the door to let Arachne unsteadily hop out. His poor car cushions... but he could always get those fixed. They walked up into his apartment, and Alan let Arachne walk into his room first. "I'm gonna power you off, Arachne, send off a quick email, then go to sleep. Good night."

"Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow!" she said, crawling towards the power outlet with a dance in her step. Alan reached over behind her, turned her off, then plugged her motorcycle battery in to charge.

"I really hope you're not dying every time you power down," he muttered idly to himself.

But that was a useless line of thought to pursue; Alan instead opened his laptop and found the file for his National Science Foundation grant proposal, promising unprecedented advances in autonomous machine learning. He typed up a quick paragraph to tie it all together, then ran it through his choice of proofreading software. Once he was satisfied, he attached it to an email and sent it for review; Alan didn't care about the Air Force either way, but money was money, and more sources was always better. If both came through, great! If one rejected him good thing he sent two.

Well, that was done. Knowing the incredible speed at which email could travel, nearly as fast as light, Alan figured he'd get a response in about a month.

He crawled into bed, leaned up against his pillow and propped one leg against the other. A swipe powered on his smartphone, lighting up the dark room. He caught up on the news, and visited some machine learning forums to give advice to beginners in the field. By then his eyelids were beginning to seriously burn with the desire to sleep. Alan powered through a few more minutes, then turned off his phone.

_Wait, I haven't showered or brushed my teeth yet._

_Eh, one day won't kill me. I'll do it when I wake_   _up._

After all, he'd had a successful day with Arachne. It seemed he only had those kind of days, and if he had anything to say about it, he always would.

Onwards and upwards.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: San Leandro Rifle and Pistol Range doesn't actually rent out guns. On their website they make it clear it's BYO. But this is a story where robots exist in 2019, so whatever.
> 
> Please do leave a comment, let me know what you think.


	5. Unappreciated Genius

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I do not own Choice of Robots. Choice of Games and Kevin Gold do.
> 
> Looking for any volunteers to edit.
> 
> Chapter published May 7th, 2019.

Alan Tezuka

"How will this help me defend myself, though?" Arachne asked after scoring her first headshot of the afternoon. She pointed the gun at the ground and 'turned' to face Lance. Alan assumed it was entirely for their benefit, since Arachne had 360 vision. "The incidence of firearms outside this range is insignificant, and few people would attempt to harm me in a place so well armed."

"People can buy guns to use outside this place," Lance explained. "It's written into the Constitution that, and I quote, 'A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.'"

"Oh! I understand. And I assume arms is in reference to weapons, and not limbs?"

Lance laughed quietly. "Yes, it means guns."

Arachne 'turned' to Alan. "Master, can we purchase a Glock G17?"

"I don't have a weapons locker, you'd need one to store it." He thought about it. "If our funding comes through, sure."

"Yay!" she cheered, then lined up another shot. Her motions were still too jerky for his liking, though. Alan'd  _really_ have to do something about that.

Alan glanced at Lance. "Does the second amendment even  _cover_  robots? I mean, I don't think being built here counts as being born on US soil."

"Should do it, I'm pretty sure the robots the military has right now are given weapons," Lance replied while keeping an eye on Arachne.

"She's different, though. All those robots have someone holding the controls. My robot's nothing like that."

Lance nodded. "Heh, that she isn't, son."

Arachne continued to display her impressive aim, as she had for the past couple of weeks they'd been coming here. Alan looked around at the others at the range, and quirked an eyebrow when he noticed something strange; usually the shooters here were content to just ignore Alan and Arachne, but a tall black man was frowning, pointing his smartphone in their direction.

Oh? Was he going on the internet? Alan had to admit it was an exciting thing to think about. Him and Arachne, on the front pages. It only made sense! After all, nobody on the planet had a robot as great as his.

But there was no point in making a big deal out of it. He let the man continue to film and watched Arachne practice her shooting long into the afternoon. Eventually the range closed, he said goodbye to Lance -  _say goodbye, Arachne. Goodbye, Lance!_ \- and drove home. By the time they got back, though, it was still early into the night, so once Alan climbed up the stairs to his apartment, he asked Arachne, "Do you want to keep learning tonight? We've got time."

"I do, Master. I was thinking of watching The Amazing Panda Adventure."

"Cool, I'll help you set up the laptop," he said, leading her into his bedroom. He got Arachne hooked up, then crawled into bed and surfed his phone.

After a few minutes of semi-aimless wandering, he noticed a new trending story on social media. A nervous, excited feeling settled into his stomach as he clicked the link.

 _'Saw this today at the San Leandro Rifle and Pistol range. What is this guy doing?'_  and below was a video of Alan helping Arachne with her shooting. The video was shot in such a way that Lance looked to be out of the way and uninvolved. Towards the end, the video panned to show the rather impressive cluster of bulletholes Arachne had scored on her target.

He read through the replies.

_'do peeps not learned their lesson after terminator?'_

_'i for one welcome our new robot overlords!'_

_'You idiots are freaking out over nothing. The military already has drones that fire rockets from the sky, this is nothing special.'_

_'theres litterally no way this ends well. i'll pray this man sees the error of his ways'_

_'omg omg this guy's TAing my class at Stanford omg wtf wtf'_

_'At least it's not a creepy human-looking robot! so we have that lmao'_

_'aww look at the cute little robot wait why's it coming my way ARRRGHR!#$!'_

Alan grunted frustratedly and logged out. Idiots. What did they know? They wouldn't be able to tell KNN from SVM! Well, when he got his grants, he could fund all kinds of things with it. He could bring the future into reality!

Alan'd show them. He'd show them all!

* * *

She was dancing.

Arachne was honest-to-God dancing.

They were in his office the next day, and instead of being on his desk, Arachne was perched in the seat across from him. She must've been watching musicals. She danced by raising and lowering her spider legs along with the central box on her body.

"Having fun over there?" Alan asked with a smile.

"Oh I am! Professor Higgins has found Eliza at his mother's house!"

"Uh... okay." He graded another paper, added it to the Complete pile, and moved on.

 _Ding!_  went his work laptop. Oh? That sounded like an email. Alan opened the client, navigated to his inbox and checked.

He smiled. A message from the National Science Foundation! He opened the email and began scanning his eyes over it.

_Dear Mr. Tezuka..._

_... we regret to inform you..._

_... attached comments go into more detail regarding our decision..._

_... wish you the best of luck..._

His smile melted like ice under the summer sun. He hadn't gotten the grant. He hadn't gotten the - how the  _hell_  hadn't he gotten the grant?! He'd built a robot! He'd created life! And they didn't even have the decency to send him a regular dismissal? Just a  _stock letter?!_ He gripped his desk so hard he hoped it would crack. Where were those comments? What did these idiots have to say for themselves?!

Fuming and grinding his teeth, he opened the attachments.

_'Professor Ziegler has always spoken a good game about the upcoming robot revolution, but it's been imminent for the past few decades if you'd believe him. The code snippets displayed here and the outlined structure are laughably simplistic. It seems it will be 'imminent' for a while longer...'_

What?! Ziegler had nothing to do with it! And who was this... Professor Hall to say his code was simple? That was the whole point! Something that took the human brain billions of neurons,  _his_  code could replicate on a smartphone!

_'Code bad. seems ignre conventional ML algorithms entirley. Is this a joke?'_

Okay, Chairman Griffin, let's see your robot! So what if he'd taken a step back from the usual ML tricks? A fresh perspective was often what was needed and his worked. Damn it, his  _worked!_  Did he need to find their addresses and march Arachne up to their doorsteps?!

_'... cannot see what the proposed utility of this code - even if it worked as described - would be. The advances listed by Dr. Ziegler's student aren't dedicated to one thing in particular. The paper's title proposed advances in autonomous AI, but instead we have a machine that is trying to be autonomous, militarily appealing, and understanding of human emotions, all at once. This hardly isolates the variables.'_

And on and on like that.

Defeated and not wanting to see more, he closed the email client and leaned back in his chair, sighing miserably. He dragged his hands across his eyes. Screw them. Screw them all! Trying to be too much? Trying to do everything? He wanted Arachne to do that. He wanted her to be strong and smart and everything under the sun. Wasn't that the whole point of robots? To be everything and do everything humans couldn't?

"Arachne," he said aloud, drawing her attention. "Do you want to know everything? Be capable of anything?"

"That sounds like an statistically significant amount of positive utility, Master. I do."

He nodded. "Good, good," he muttered. But what was he going to do now? That source was out, and still no word on the military grant. Maybe he could call up Josh? He was the CEO of U.S. Robots, he'd like something like Arachne. Too bad he and Elly hadn't stayed together, because he could...

Without warning, the door to his office opened. He sat up. ' _Mind knocking?'_  he nearly said, before seeing who it was. "Oh, Professor Ziegler." He wrinkled his nose at the smell of smoke. "What brings you here?"

"I've got good news," he said, waddling in. "Hmm, looks like you could use it."

"I sent in a proposal to the National Science Foundation. Just got turned down."

"Is that all? Hmmph." Ziegler scratched his beard. "Well, you don't need it. My DARPA BAA grant just got approved this morning. First paycheck should be in your account; you're funded for the rest of your studies."

Alan blinked, his prior anger and indignity evaporating. "Oh! That's... good!" he said, hardly believing it.

Arachne turned away from her laptop, faced Ziegler, and tossed her hands into the air. "Yay!" she cheered in her musical voice.

"Gets better. There's an Air Force acquisitions officer who seems interested in our work."  _My work!_  "A Captain Juliet Rogers, the one you sent the demo to. Hmm." Professor Ziegler leaned forward, grabbed a piece of scrap paper from Alan's pile, and scribbled on it. "Here's the number she gave me, you two should talk. You could have a great career in government science."

He looked at the number. "I'll, uh, keep it in mind," he said numbly, still stunned. He'd gotten funding? Wow. He could... he could do so much! Make Arachne waterproof, get her more memory, get her that weapons locker.  _At least the military appreciates what I do,_  he thought bitterly. "This is great news."

"It is." Ziegler glanced down at Arachne and startled, like he'd only just noticed her. He recovered quickly. "So this is the robot? Hmm. Looked a lot more menacing when you were building the parts. Barely comes up to my knee. Like a toddler."

" _Excuse_  me?" Arachne said, placing a claw to her chest.

"Anyway, keep up the good work," he said, leaving before either Alan or Arachne could get another word in edgewise.

"Thanks for knocking," Alan told the shut door. He looked at the number. Well, may as well. He had time.

He dialed the number on his phone, waited a few rings, and then there was a click. "This is Captain Rogers speaking," came a woman's voice.

"Hi, this is Alan Tezuka. I think you recently spoke to my advisor, Dr. Ziegler?"

"Ah, Tezuka. The shooting range robot creator, right?"

His eyes widened and he sat up. "Does  _everyone_  know about that?"

There was a light chuckle on the end of the line. "It hasn't blown up as much as you're afraid of, but it's my job to keep an eye out for up and coming talent like yours. I received your demo video too. Don't worry about the peanut gallery, I'm impressed with what I saw."

He smiled. "Hear that Arachne? She's impressed with you."

"Who is? A lady on the phone?" Arachne asked, cocking her panoptic head to the side.

"Hah," Captain Rogers continued. "The eight legs and camera design looks good, a nice step outside the box. But the aim seems a bit off to me. We have robots with better aim now, is it a bug?"

"Not a bug, Arachne's just learning," he explained. "I  _could_  make a shooter-bot, but then it'd know how to do that, and only that. Arachne can do anything as long as she learns it. Like a human, but she picks up things much faster than you or I ever could."

"Definitely sounds interesting," she said. "Keep it up, and once you get your doctorate, we'll see if you can't start making and selling those robots to the Air Force en masse."

"I'll keep you in mind."

"Excellent. In that case, have a good day."

"Have a good - "  _Click!_  " - day," he finished lamely, looking at the phone. Alan looked at Arachne. "Well, we still have a bit before we can leave for the range."

Arachne looked up at him, then down, then back up. "Actually, Master, I have a request," she said. "Instead of going to the range, I would like to acquire my own firearm for future outings."

He smiled. "Of course we can. I'll have to look over the gun laws, but - "

She tilted her head. "One moment, Master." A beat passed. "To purchase a gun in the state of California, you must complete a Firearm Safety Certificate. You can fill out the form - which is a multiple choice questionnaire - for a fee of twenty-five US Dollars. Afterwards your gun will be available for you to pick up from a store after fifteen days, but no more than thirty-eight days, and you must possess a gun lock to retrieve it from the store."

"Oh." He blinked. "Thank you, Arachne."

"My pleasure, Master!" she chirped.

"Right, I'll see if there's a study guide for that." He brought up the internet browser on his work laptop and began searching. "And then we'll head off."

Before long, Alan found a website describing the contents of California's laws, complete with a practice test. He worked through it a few times, checked his bank account to make sure he had gotten the payment, and nodded to himself happily. He logged off his computer, stood from his desk, and stretched with a groan. A series of pops went  _right_  up his spine. Arachne fell into step beside him before he even began walking, and she continued right at his side on the walk to his car.

While walking, he scrolled through his phone. Apparently the video of him and Arachne at the firing range had started  _#SanFranKillerBot_. What a world.

According to the GPS, Peninsula Guns and Tactical was in South San Francisco, just a half hour drive from Stanford. Traffic was light today on his route, but a look into the other lane made him smile in schadenfreude; the other side of the roads was practically a parking lot.

They eventually arrived. Peninsula Guns and Tactical was nestled between a martial arts dojo and sushi store. After making a few laps around the building trying to find a parking spot, he gave up and parallel parked with Arachne looking out the back window warily. Beneath the blocky black letters 'Peninsula Guns' was a camo-patterned overhang and a door marked 'pull'. He yanked it open, and held it for Arachne to crawl inside.

Inside, the first thing he noticed was the chilly air conditioning that made goosebumps crawl across his skin. It smelled like sawdust. Guns were held up on a big wooden board behind the counter, which was manned by a blonde woman in a camouflage shirt. There was a glass case in front of her, showcasing a variety of different ammos. The store was lined with racks that each held more guns as though they were gift cards. Aside from himself and the employee, the store was empty. Maybe he'd come in during slow hours.

A whispered  _'Holy fuck'_  came from the woman at the cash register. Arachne, meanwhile, was spinning about, her cameras adjusting on everything in sight. Her legs excitedly moved in place.

"There's so many here, Master! I can have one of these?"

"Eventually, Arachne, remember. Waiting time."

"I can have one of these! Yay!" she cheered, enthusiasm uncurbed. They walked up the counter and the stunned woman behind it. Alan leaned down, gripped Arachne beneath her box, and lifted her up with a grunt so she could talk to the employee. "Hi! What handguns do you have for purchase? A Glock G17?"

At last, the woman came to life. She took a deep breath, and let it out. "I'm just gonna roll with this," she muttered to herself, before turning her attention to Arachne with a wide customer-service smile. "Glock 17, you mean. We do, Gen Three as well, right over there by our handguns," she said, pointing. "But first, sir, do you have a California Firearm Safety Certificate?"

"I don't, actually," he said, putting Arachne now with a heave. "Can I fill it out here?"

"Twenty five dollar fee," the woman said, pulling out a paper and pen from under the register. "You have - "

" - two attempts, I know, thanks," he said with a smile. Alan looked down at Arachne. "Go pick out which one you want, but remember, no touching!"

"Of course not, Master!" she huffed, as if insulted, already scuttling off.

Alan turned back to the woman, handed over his credit card, and began filling out the tests. Just a few questions, some true-or-false, some multiple choice. He went through it easy-peasy, checked and double checked, signed his name before he forgot, then handed it back to the woman. She looked it over, nodded, then stashed it in a drawer.

"Looks good, but I'll still have to send it in, and do a background check, Mr. Tezuka. Would you like us to alert you with text or email?"

"Email's fine," he said. "A-Tezuka at gmail dot com."

Arachne came back at that moment, dancing side to side on her many legs. "I have decided which firearm I want, do you need the serial number?" she asked, trying to look up at the woman from her short vantage point.

"Please do." Arachne rattled off a string of numbers and letters, and the cashier looked back to Alan. "Alright, I'll send you a message when your background check is gone, certificate approved, and when you can pick up your firearm. Remember to bring a gun lock with you when you come."

"Will do, thanks! Come on Arachne," he said, reaching down to her. Arachne reached up to him and grabbed his hand with her grippers, and he led her back to the car.

Traffic back was miserable. He supposed it was what he deserved for laughing at the people stuck in it on the way to the gun store.

It was pitch black by the time he got back to his apartment. Once back inside, Arachne asked to continue learning rather than power down for the night. So she crawled to the corner, his laptop's screen a shifting mosaic of images.

Alan brushed his teeth and showered, then crawled into bed to do some shopping on his phone. First was a weapons locker and gun lock for Arachne, easy enough to get on Amazon. But then he'd gotten to thinking about what to do with his grant money.

Professor Ziegler had called Arachne a toddler. And she was short, no doubt about that. Three feet tall. The body was barebones, too. He was already thinking of ways to improve it; he could streamline the design, waterproof it, give it more memory, with a special CPU for her brain instead of a phone, taller too. It'd have to be a surprise, though. Maybe he could leave her at home, sometimes, and go work on her new body in the machine shop. But Arachne was smart, so how could he keep her from figuring it out? Hmm.

Well, it was a problem he had a lot of time to solve. He put his phone aside and felt his eyelids slide shut...

_CLANG!_

Alan woke up in the middle of the night with the thought  _'Oh fuck I'm being robbed'_ in his head. He shot straight up and looked over to where Arachne had been learning and

she

wasn't

there.

Like a rocket he exploded out of bed and ran to the door, wrenching it open and running into the kitchen, ready to jump on whoever was, was, was.

There was nobody. Just Arachne sitting by the stove with her hands on her round head, surrounded by pots and pans. One of the cabinet doors was open, swinging gently. It was dark outside the windows. Her body was lowered to the ground and she was frozen still.

He let out a sigh of relief, heart still hammering in his chest. Oh thank God, she'd just been, um... "Arachne? What happened?"

"I'm sorry, Master!" she said, running over to him and wrapping her arms around one leg. "I'd watched cooking shows recently, and I figured I wanted to try it out, and I was going to make you breakfast but I didn't anticipate how everything was stacked and - "

"Hey, hey, shh," Alan said, kneeling down and running a hand along Arachne's head. Her eyes were wide open and terrified. "It's okay, it's okay. Let's just put all this stuff back, alright? I can show you how to make scrambled eggs."

"Thank you, Master," Arachne said haltingly, pulling away.

Alan began putting everything back in its place. "Oh, we keep this, though." He grabbed a pan and set it on the stove. "We'll need that one. Also, obviously, eggs." He opened the fridge; it was sparsely stocked since he usually just ordered takeout, but he kept some milk and stuff in it. There was also still a carton of eggs and, from the smell of it, they were still good. "So first, we need some oil." He grabbed a bottle and drizzled some into the pan. "Then we turn on the heat - here." He helped Arachne. "Climb up." She clambered onto the tabletop and looked at the stove intently. "Now, do you want to try cracking the eggs?"

"I do!"

"Here, hold them gently," he said, handing one over to her. Alan also got a small bowl. "Crack them against the side of this, and pour the insides in."  _Crack!_  "Just like that, good job! Try again for the second." He gave Arachne another egg, and she expertly cracked that one too.

Arachne clapped her gripped claws together. "I did it! Master, did you see? I did it!"

He smiled. "You did! Now we heat the pan up." He turned the stove on. "And we wait."

"How do you know the temperature to heat it to and the seconds to wait?" Arachne asked, tilting her head.

"I actually don't, I just sort of wing it. I'm sure on the internet there's a more numerical guide. But just watch." The oil started heating up, forming odd little lines inside it, and that was when Alan decided it was good to pour in the eggs. He grabbed a wooden spatula. "Watch how I stir, you don't want it to stick down or it'll burn," he cautioned, showing Arachne what to do. "Eventually the eggs'll harden, like this. You take it off the heat, turn the stove off, and voila. Scrambled eggs."

"Ooh, I see! Is it good, Master?"

"Let's see." He grabbed a fork, blew on the eggs to cool them down, then found a seat and dug in. "Yeah, they're good. Hmm. Could use some salt." He sprinkled some on from a salt shaker. "Better."

"Master, do you think I could ever taste food? Via an artificial taste receptor?" she asked, moving from the kitchen countertop to the table he was sitting at.

Alan brought a finger to his chin. "Probably? Certainly not for a few years. Neurologists would have to map out the human brain more thoroughly first. But you never have to die, so you can definitely live to see it eventually." He finished off his eggs, then got up and stretched. "Well, I'm up now. I'm gonna get some coffee and do some work. Are you good to just surf the internet?"

"I am, Master. I'll see you in the morning when we leave for the university!" Arachne crawled away, leaving Alan alone.

He brushed his teeth, took a quick shower, then grabbed his phone and began thinking.

Now, what should he get for Arachne's new body?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do leave a comment, let me know what you think.


	6. Meeting the World

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do not own Choice of Robots. Choice of Games and Kevin Gold do.
> 
> Looking for any volunteers to edit.
> 
> Chapter published May 16th, 2019.

Alan Tezuka

Weeks passed, and life went on.

They sat in his office, Arachne learning and Alan working. Until she asked...

"Master, when are you going to answer your phone?"

"Huh?" Alan checked his cell, but there was nothing. It wasn't odd to get calls anymore - they were nearing the end of the semester, and crawling from the woodwork were the 'I know I didn't do anything all year, but surely there's some way to get extra credit' students. But at the moment, nada, zero, zip, no messages. "What do you mean?"

Arachne giggled. "No, no! Not that one, your other phone!"

His other phone? What was she... oh! The old landline in his office? He reached over to it and picked up the phone. Literally picked it - who  _picked up_  phones these days?!

A tinny voice greeted him. "You have - one - new messages. To view your messages, please enter your PIN code."

Alan's finger hovered over the keypad, but then he realized he didn't remember his PIN. He had dim memories of setting it at the beginning of grad school, but he'd never needed it even once until this day. He put the phone down, brought up Stanford's website on his work desktop, and began searching for how to reset his PIN. Meanwhile, Arachne hopped up onto his desk and lowered her head to the landline, peering at it curiously. Her ethernet cable, still plugged into his laptop, nearly got tangled on a drawer.

He had to make a few phone calls on his cell, and fish out some other ID info buried in the depths of the university's computer systems, but after a chat with a lovely, endlessly helpful lady, he successfully reset his PIN.

Alan tossed the ancient phone from one hand to the other, then brought it up to his ear. "You have - one - new messages. To view your messages, please enter your - " He pressed the buttons.  _Beep beep beep beep beep._  "New message one." And then it switched to a young man's voice. "Hey, Alan. This is Mark, over at sfchronicle dot com. Word is you've got a pretty interesting robot you've been taking to the shooting range, and I'd love to do a story about you and it. Give me a call back at this number," he said, listing off a phone number.

With a click, the message ended. "Did you catch that?" he asked Arachne. He put the phone back.

"I heard it, Master," she answered. Arachne paused, then replied. "Who-is service says sfchronicle dot com is registered to the San Francisco Chronicle, a newspaper that started its website in 1994. This is its twenty-fourth year in circulation."

"Well yeah, I could've guessed it was a newspaper of some kind. Probably more blogs than papers these days, though."

Arachne held up a claw and closed her many eyes. "There's more. If I use Bayesian reasoning over publication rates, I can conclude that the reporter's full name is Mark Ali. His article with the most social media likes is, quote, how I learned to stop worrying and love DARPA, unquote." She opened her eyes and tilted her head back and forth with a mechanical grind. She hesitated, lifting a leg, then settling it. "The article itself appears to contradict his own title - he does not appear to have stopped worrying. Significant adjectives bound to DARPA and DARPA related activities are: crazy, Orwellian, and imperialistic."

"... and DARPA's funding, well, you," he said with a gesture to Arachne. "I'm gonna guess this guy's not going to be head over heels for you," he muttered, more to himself than Arachne. He brought up his phone and searched for Mark Ali. There was a ton of people with the same name, but when he filtered for reporters at the SF Chronicle, he narrowed it down and found a picture of the reporter in question. Mark was -

\- oh wow, he was  _cute_.

Alan assumed Mark's facebook picture was outdated. He was an Egyptian man with oily black hair tousled on top of his head, with hints of stubble around his chin. He wore large, red-rimmed glasses, and a cigarette hung from between his bared teeth. It was difficult to tell from the angle of the picture, but his hands might've been on his hips. There was a sort of bored, 'yeah, whatever' look in his eyes. Mark looked no older than Alan himself. Maybe even his junior.

Butterflies began collecting in Alan's stomach. A reporter. This was it, this was his chance! His chance to show the world what he'd done. Screw the video about Arachne at the range. Screw the idiots at the NSF. This was his chance to set the record straight. There wasn't a machine in the world as amazing as Arachne, and it was time the world knew it.

He reached over to the phone and played the voicemail back. "Hey, Alan, this is Mark..."

And again. "Hey Alan, this is Mark..."

And again. "Hey Alan, this is Mark..."

First, he'd look into Mark a bit more. He opened a new tab on his phone and looked up some other pieces Mark had written. There was the one about DARPA that Arachne had found. Another blasting some of China's Big-Brothery policies. Yet another about US intervention in the Middle East. They were scathing and blunt, but all his sources were cited. Mark showed his work. What a world; a journalist who did actual journalism?

If he'd done work for his other articles, he'd have done his homework on Alan too. And that meant Mark'd certainly already made up his mind about Arachne without even having met her. It'd be an uphill battle to make the man see things his way.

But... no. This was his chance to set the record straight. He'd start with Mark, and Mark would tell everyone else the truth, and from there it'd all fall into place.

Alan dialed the number on his smartphone and put it on speaker. He also put a finger up to his mouth, gesturing for Arachne to be quiet. There was a click, and Mark's voice came through the phone. "Hey?"

"Hey Mark," he said, smiling. "Mark Ali, right?"

"Yeah, you've reached Mark Ali. Who is this?"

"This is Alan, you left me a message and I just got it today. I think I'd like to take you up on your offer, with the story."

"Oh. Oh!" There was the ruffling of paper on the other end. "That's great to hear, Alan. What time works for you?"

"Any time after five's good."

"After... five," Mark said, and Alan could hear scribbling. "Do you know where Blondie's Bar is?"

"In the... Mission, right?" Alan said, cocking his head to the side.

"That's the one. Meet me there at six, yeah? On... does Thursday work for you?"

Today was Monday. Alan ran through his schedule mentally. Tuesday, Wednesday... "Works fine. I'll see you then."

"Great! Looking forward to meeting you, Alan. Thank you. Thank you, bye." There was a click as Mark hung up.

Alan pumped a fist. "Alright! I've got a meeting set up." How should he dress? Something casual, right? Not a suit or something.

Arachne jumped in place. "I'm very happy for you, Master! Do you think I could come, too? I want to finally meet the rest of the world."

"I don't think he'd like it if I just brought you along, but I'll talk him into interviewing you too," he said, reaching up to pat Arachne's head with a smile. "No promises, though." He opened a new page on his work computer. Time to see if there were any guides for an interviewee.

* * *

Alan spent the days leading up to the interview alternating between TAing, secretly working on Arachne's new body in the machine shop, and teaching her patty-cake in an attempt to help the jerkiness in her motions. He did his homework on Mark, read some of his articles, and imagined what sort of questions he'd be asked and rehearsed his responses - but not  _too_  rehearsed, he didn't want to come off as robotic.

Ha ha. Robotic.

When it was time to leave the office for the day, he drove Arachne back to his apartment while she hummed a movie theme in her musical voice. Alan got out of the car when they arrived, led her into the apartment, and turned to face her. "Alright, you'll be okay here on your own?"

"I will be, Master," she said, crawling into his room. The newest addition to it was a giant metal locker pushed into the corner, as tall as Alan was, with combination locks and hatches to keep it concealed. Inside was Arachne's gun, though technically his by law. Arachne, with practiced precision, hooked herself into his laptop and began rewatching Primer. "Have fun!" she said with a wave to him.

"You too." He headed back into his car and drove off for Blondie's Bar. It was, with traffic, an hour long drive into the heart of San Francisco. Skyscrapers rose up around him, and tiny mom-and-pop stores competed for room. Rows of anemic trees separated the sidewalks and roads. He heard vibrant music far to the right as he grew closer to the bar, but whatever festival it was, he didn't much care.

Alan only cared about one thing; finding Mark and putting this 'mad scientist building a killbot' nonsense to rest.

He parked by the streets and put two hours into the meter. The sky was drab with clouds, and the still air let the scent of the city fester in place. He found Blondie's Bar in no time and stood outside the purple-tinted doors, taking deep breaths to steady his nerves. Didn't look like there were too many people inside yet. Shoulders up. Back straight. Confidence. Be confident.

Pulling the doors open, he walked inside and appraised the place. Empty save for some drunks, just like he'd thought from outside. Cigarette smoke seeped up from the upholstered furniture scattered around the building. Hispanic music played from a jukebox.

Maybe not just drunks. He found Mark sitting at the bar in a leather jacket, typing away on an ancient-looking Chromebook. Mark had apparently found Alan too, because he was looking at him from the corner of his eyes. The picture of Mark on the internet must not've been too out of date; aside from the real Mark having more stubble, they were the same.

Then they locked eyes, and Alan stiffened. That look. He knew that look. He'd seen it on arts majors and theater majors and English majors a dozen times.  _'Oh, here comes mister high-and-mighty STEM student! Please do forgive us for not bowing and scraping to you!'_  The hair on his arms bristled. Who the hell did this guy think he was?

"Thanks for coming," Mark said, taking a deep pull off an electronic cigarette while still typing. "Glad you didn't ask for an email interview - please, sit." He did, looking at Mark. "Those are bullshit. Like, would you go buy a car without seeing it in person? No. Bullshit. You've gotta go out there and see what it's like."

"I know what you mean," Alan replied stiffly, looking Mark up and down. "If everything that worked in theory worked in practice, we'd have lightsabers by now."

"Ha!" Mark grinned, but it died down when he noticed how tense Alan was.

 _Loosen up, Alan. Loose, loose._  His shoulders relaxed.

"Oh, PBR please," Mark said as the bartender - a tattooed woman with an outrageous number of piercings - came by. She nodded.

"Just water for me," Alan said. He needed to drive back, after all.

She narrowed her eyes. "Really? Just water?"

"Oh, come off it," Mark said, laying a palm flat on the table. "I'll have two drinks, then."

She scoffed. "Yeah, of  _PBR_." But without further complaint she went to get their orders.

A tense silence passed over the two of them as they stared at each other. Alan's skin bristled. Maybe this'd been a mistake. There were so many stories about reporters spinning things and twisting your words into the very opposite of what you'd said. He'd have to be careful.

"So, your robot. You'll need to fill me in, because all I've got to work with are the videos shot of you two at the range. What inspired its design? By which I mean the spider legs and mushroom head with all the eyes?"

There. That was a simple enough question. "I wanted it to be strong and adaptable," he said. "There's no reason for robots to share the same weaknesses we have. Back when I was brainstorming I'd thought about some  _really_  esoteric designs, but I eventually settled on this one. Like, you could make a robot with a hundred arms, but then you also need to code it to learn how to use all those arms. The legs and head were my compromise between being strong, and my own coding limitations." Was he saying 'code' too much? Maybe he could've said 'program' at one point. How badly was Alan screwing up already?

Oh God. The butterflies in his stomach were multiplying.

Like an angel from heaven, the bartender returned with their drinks. He took a big sip of water to calm his nerves.

"Interesting," Mark said. "So, I think I should cut to the most interesting bit and circle back later. Any time a new robot comes out people want to know," Mark held his hands apart, "how smart is it? Is it like a mouse? Have you reached full human intelligence? A dog?"

"Arachne is absolutely as smart as a human," Alan said, maybe a touch too defensively. "She's only a few months old, but already as smart as a young child. With how quickly she's learning from movies and other media, it's only a matter of time before she reaches adult intelligence, and then surpasses it altogether."

"Interesting, but you say 'intelligence' as a catch all. It's been well established that general intelligence isn't real - " Alan bristled, " - so how would you categorize the robot's intelligence? Mathematics goes without saying, but if it's been learning from movies like you said, then what about emotional, social, et cetera?" Mark said with the flourish of one hand. The other kept typing.

"General intelligence absolutely is real," Alan said, maybe a little hotter than he'd mean to. "If intelligence is simply the ability to find solutions to problems, then it's simple. Mathematical intelligence is how well you can solve math problems, social intelligence is solving social problems, and then general intelligence is how good you are at solving  _any given_  problem. Arachne's absolutely phenomenal in that, and shows no signs of slowing down. I'm very proud."

Mark eyed him strangely, raising an eyebrow enough to set his hipster glasses askew. "I see. I'll backtrack here - " Mark took a sip of his beer, " - to how it's learning. You're saying the robot's learning with movies?"

"And TV shows," he clarified. "You'd think it's a bad idea; wouldn't want the robot to start thinking dragons and aliens are real, after all. But she can filter that out, and can also learn a lot of good common sense stuff from it, plus there's loads of stuff flagged as educational to learn from, too. It's not just Arachne's ability to watch it all in fast forward - uh, I should probably segue a bit. Arachne can't think  _that_  much faster than us because simulating human thought takes a lot of effort. So it's not just her fast forward that's going to help robots surpass us, but her ability to understand, incorporate, and grow from it."

The other man took another pull from his e-cigarette. "Hmm, wouldn't have thought of it like that." He typed something else on his chromebook. Alan caught a glimpse;  _'Where's the wisdom etc'._

"Where's the wisdom?" he asked, fidgeting with his water.

"A quote from T.S. Elliot," Mark said, looking at him. He held his chin up and closed his eyes. " _'Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?'_  I'm thinking of using it in the piece."

But wasn't wisdom just another type of intelligence? Mark was making a dig at him, wasn't he? Prick.

"So what was your adviser's name again?"

"Professor Harvey Ziegler," he said without thinking. Alan blinked. "He's been my adviser throughout my doctoral program."

"Right, that's the one. He's famous for his proclamations that in the near future, robots will be smarter than humans, not unlike how you said your machine will be. I'm kinda curious how much influence he's had on you."

If the hair on his skin had bristled before, it absolutely stood at attention now. The butterflies in his gut turned all at once to bitter, furious acid. He remembered the comments on his NSF proposal, how everyone had just seen him as 'Ziegler's student', and he saw red. "He had nothing to do with it. The only contribution he had was demanding Arachne appeal to the military for a grant. I did all the coding, all the building, all the training  _myself!_ "

"Whoa, whoa, easy there," Mark said, reaching out. He gripped Alan's hand and took it off the glass of water, which he'd unknowingly started squeezing in an attempt to crush. "I get it, Ziegler didn't help you. What about his request for military appeal? Didn't he give any pointers? You know, in an attempt to get the grant?"

Alan scoffed. "Some, but they were all things I'd come up with anyway. He only came in once, when I was already partway through building Arachne. I'd long ago finished designing the algorithms for her mind by then." Alan's eyes grew dark. He had to make sure there was no chance Ziegler got any undeserved credit. Arachne was  _his_  doing! His alone! If Ziegler wanted credit he should've helped! "Read my lips; he did nothing, and I did everything."

"He... did... nothing," Mark said, typing it in. Alan sat back with a satisfied smile. Was it petty? Maybe. But hopefully he'd finally get the credit he deserved. "You mentioned it was for a grant. Who's funding your, uh, 'Arachne' bot again?"

"DARPA is," he said. Mark's eyes narrowed dangerously, and Alan got a cold feeling in his spine. "But don't worry, they fund a lot of stuff. Most science in the country gets its funding from DARPA in one way or another."

Another sip of PBR for Mark. "I think you can appreciate how that's not the most relaxing thing to hear. What exactly do you think your designs will be used for?"

Used for? Alan figured it'd be best to leave off his long-term plans of 'surpassing humanity and solving everything we cannot'. Used for, used for... he was coming up blank. "I've never really thought of it," he said honestly. "But to be fair, I don't really care. The military'll find use for anything. You could cure hunger by building a magic wand that makes gourmet food out of thin air and they'll use it as a weapon."

"Hmm." Mark's mouth quirked oddly as he recorded the response. "Well, whatever your feelings on the military, you've got to admit the robot you made looks pretty dangerous. I'm sure all my readers will be worried that something like, well,  _that_  could turn on humanity."

He rolled his eyes. "You've been watching too many movies. If anything, I'm worried that robots will be in danger from humans, precisely because of the attitudes you described. Arachne needs to be strong, to defend herself."

"Wait, so, if someone wants to, I dunno, shut down their toaster, you'd be okay with the toaster shooting them with a gun?" Mark asked incredulously.

He was tempted to roll his eyes again. "If the toaster can think and feel, I hope you'd agree it's just as worthwhile as the human is. It's self defense. People are gonna have to accept the idea that robots are as valuable as them."  _If not moreso,_  he didn't say.

"Uh huh." More typing. "Last question; would it be okay for me to send a photographer to take pictures of your robot?"

He smiled, and remembered his promise to Arachne. "Sure. In fact, you can come along and interview her yourself."

Mark blinked owlishly. "Uh, really? You're sure?"

"Most roboticists wouldn't allow it, because their robots only work in very narrow conditions. Think about how easy it is to trip up Cleverbot. But Arachne's different, and I want to give her a chance to prove it herself." He smiled, his earlier anger at Ziegler and frustration with Mark evaporating at the thought of his little bot. "Besides, she's eager to meet you and interact with the rest of the world."

"Alright. Then, I guess you have my number. We'll be in touch."

Alan quickly finished off the rest of his water, then reached out his hand. "We will. Pleasure meeting you," he half-lied. "Good luck on your story."

"Same." Mark shook his hand, then quickly let it go. "Well, don't wait up. I'll cover the water while I'm editing."

"Thanks. Right, I should get back to my apartment." Alan turned, walked out of the bar, and the moment he was outside he shivered and all the tension in his body melted out. "So glad that's over," he said to himself, making a beeline for where he'd parked his car.

Once in, he shook himself out and gripped the wheel like his life depended on it. He felt numb and shaky and sick and, and  _empty._

It'd gotten dark while Mark interviewed him. The drive back was free of traffic, and when Alan got back into his apartment he found Arachne had already powered herself down for the night. He showered, got changed, put in a load of laundry, brushed his teeth, and went to bed.

He went to bed, but sleep eluded him. He lay awake, staring up at the roughly patterned swirls of paint on his ceiling. He closed his eyes and tossed and turned, heart fluttering like a hummingbird while he imagined what Mark was up to, who that photographer he was contacting was, how he'd interview Arachne, when he could expect to hear back...

It was fine. He didn't need sleep anyways.

* * *

Mark called back around noon the next day, and they set up an appointment for Arachne to be photographed and interviewed. He spent the wait with Arachne, playing little coordination and memory games - though the latter were pointless since, as a robot, Arachne's memory was perfect. Alan introduced her to some higher level books, containing information more specific than anything she could get with simple movies.

She was rather fond of Khan Academy, too.

They went to the range, Alan worked in secret on her new body, and Arachne learned more and more. Finals loomed upon the defenseless undergrads like a tsunami. His days were filled with nervous energy, wondering if he was doing the right thing getting interviewed by Mark. But then came Saturday, the day of Arachne's interview.

The two of them were sat around the kitchen table. Alan held his hands in front of him, pointer fingers together, making a football goal. Arachne narrowed her eyes at him, and flicked a piece of paper with her claws. It soared up, seemingly bounced off the air, and landed outside the field.

"Shit!"

Alan's eyes widened and a jolt ran through his body. "Arachne,  _language!_ "

She shrunk down. "Sorry, Master."

"It's fine, it's fine." He picked up the paper and handed it back to her. "Reset." He folded his hands up, ready to give her another shot.

_Knock knock knock!_

"Nevermind," Alan said, getting up. "Stay there, Arachne?"

"Yes, Master!" she chirped, fiddling with the paper in her grip.

Alan went to open the door, and found Mark standing there along with what he assumed was his photographer, a young blonde woman with short, ripped up jeans and a t-shirt. Mark's Chromebook was folded underneath one arm. "Hey, can we come in?" Mark asked, straightening his glasses with his free hand.

"Please do," he said, holding the door open and stepping aside. "Can I get you anything to drink?"

"Do you have Sprite?" the woman asked, a southern accent suffusing her words.

"No, sorry."

"I'm fine, then."

"Hi Mark Ali! Hello photographer!" Arachne said, waving a claw at them.

They both blinked, and Mark was the first to snap out of it. He waved back slowly. "Uh, hi there. Arachne, was it?"

She bobbed up and down. "It is!" She paused, in what Alan had come to recognize was her accessing her memory for a quote. "That's my name, don't wear it out!"

"Alright." Mark turned to Alan. "We'll take the pictures first, then I've prepared some questions for your, uh, robot." He looked at Arachne's many eyes and took a step back. "Erin, how's the lighting?"

"Let me see," the photographer drawled. She walked around the room, turning lights on and off, opening and closing doors. She opened and shut the blinds on the windows. Eventually she settled on some combination where the blinds were shut but every other light - even the one on the apartment's stove - was on. She held up her camera, which looked like something taken straight out of an older movie - blocky side, large aperture on the end, even that little, uh, thing on top that flashed. "Robot, climb up onto the table there," she said.

Arachne hopped up.

"Good," Erin continued. "Mister Tezuka, please stand next to her and, uh..." Arachne had jumped down, stumbled on the landing, and crawled over to the woman and looked up at her. "Can I help you?" she asked, taking a step back with a face like Arachne was a spider getting too close.

"You've got a camera!"

"Uh, yes, I do.  _Please_  get back up."

"Sorry!" she chirped, scuttling away and hopping back up. Behind Erin, Mark shook his head.

"Alright, Mister Tezuka, please stand next to her, make like you're fixing some of the wires or something."

Sounded simple enough. "Alright." He walked over, and reached out to gently hold some of the wires leading into Arachne's gripper hands. "Like this?"

"Perfect, just hold still." She held the camera up to her eye, and -

Arachne shifted, looking down at Alan.

"Please tell your robot to hold still."

"Arachne, please hold still. The picture won't be as nice if you're moving."

She crossed her arms and 'turned' away from Alan. "Hmmph!"

"No no, that's not a good pose," Erin said dryly. "Like you were before."

" _Please,_  Arachne. It's just for a second."

"Oh, fine, Master," she said, moving back to how she'd been before.

 _FLASH!_  "Alright, that's good. A few more." There weren't flashes for the rest of the pictures, but there was a series of small clicks. "Hmm. Do you have a toolbox or something anywhere?" Erin asked, lowering her camera.

"In my room," Alan said. He thought he understood where this was going. "Want me to go get it?"

"Please do."

Alan let go of Arachne and headed off to his room. He opened the door, headed in, and closed it behind him because he was paranoid and didn't want Mark or Erin to see inside. His toolbox was in the corner, and some of the wire cutters were scattered about. He put them back together, closed the toolbox, and left his room. Back in the living room, he'd noticed that Arachne had since crawled back off the tabletop and was next to Erin again. She held a plastic toy camera in her claws, turning it over and curiously bringing it to one eye at a time from multiple angles.

"Arachne, leave the nice lady alone. Come on, back on the table."

"Aww, fine." Still fiddling with the camera, she made her way back up top. Alan placed the toolbox next to her spider legs, got a wire stripper, and froze like he was working on one of her joints.

 _Click click click_  went Erin's camera. She walked around and took pictures from a few other perspectives. Arachne, meanwhile, kept oohing and aahing at the toy camera in her hands. "Alright, I think I've got enough."

"Thanks, Erin. Why don't you take off?" Mark said, walking forward.

"Sure thing. Uh, keep the camera."

While the photographer swept out of Alan's apartment, Mark placed his Chromebook onto the table and took a seat. Alan stepped back, giving the two their space. "So, uh, Arachne." She looked down at him. Mark looked around nervously, like someone would bust in and take away his reporter's license for interviewing a robot. "What's it like being a machine?"

"Well, it's hard to say, Mister Ali. I'd like to think it's a lot like being a human, but you're metal and not squishy. Also, you never forget anything." She picked up the wire stripper and turned it over in her claws.

He wrote that in his Chromebook. Alan hovered nervously behind him, watching intently. Part of him was worried Mark would ask something out of line. If he did, Alan was ready to... he didn't know what, but he was  _ready._  "So aside from small things like that, you don't see yourself as fundamentally different from a human."

Arachne shook her head, as best she could given its panoptic design. "Nope!" She dropped the tool. "Whoops!"

"I see." He tapped his chin. "So what kind of things make you happy, then?"

"Oh, let me see. Movies and television series, followed by successive headshots with a firearm, followed by discovering and understanding new information, followed by practicing my motor coordination, followed by being around Master." She paused. "I... believe if I went further it'd be excessive, and the proportional enjoyment drops sharply, but there  _are_  other things I enjoy."

"Successive... headshots," Mark typed. "That's fine, that's fine. So what did you do this morning?"

Alan narrowed his eyes. That was a question used to confuse Cleverbot-style computers. Mark didn't think Arachne was the real deal, did he?

"After Master powered me on, I helped him make scrambled eggs again. I'm still unsteady with stirring them, though. We both watched shows, me with the ethernet and him on his phone. Then we played paper football until you arrived, but it wasn't morning by then so I'm not sure that counts."

"Oh, uh, wow." Mark looked stunned. "Sounds like you had a busy day. So, are you aware of who is funding your creation?"

"DARPA is, which is an acronym for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Why do you ask?"

"Well." Mark leaned back into his seat. "It's just that if DARPA's funding you, odds are they want to see if they can build more military robots like yourself for enforcing the United States' will on other sovereign nations. How do you feel about this knowledge?"

Arachne  _hmmed_  out loud. "Well... I think it's fine. Machines like me have the potential to be much stronger than humans, right? So if we take the place of humans, then casualties go down drastically."

"But then other nations would also begin developing robots to deploy in return, and you end up like so many soldiers before you, puppets to corporate and government overlords, in a fight that isn't yours, in an increasingly deadly arms race. Is that something you're okay with?"

Alan's hackles rose and red tinted as his vision.  _What the FUCK, Mark?! She's a child!_

"I... hadn't thought that scenario through so far," Arachne said haltingly. After another moment she huddled in on herself and closed some of her eyes. "I don't want to pursue this line of thought anymore."

Luckily - for him - Mark knew to back off. "Alright, let's talk about something else."

The interview continued, with Mark asking suspicious probing questions about war, violence, and how good Arachne was with a gun, and whenever he wasn't he needled Arachne with questions clearly designed to trip up chatbots.

Finally, Mark seemed to be satisfied. "Alright, thank you for your time, Arachne." He closed his Chromebook and stood up.

"Yes, you are welcome," she said quietly.

"And thank you," Mark told Alan, holding out his hand.

Alan just stared at it, arms crossed, and fumed quietly. "Yes, you're welcome. Have a good day," he said stiffly, pointedly not shaking.

Mark frowned, but withdrew his hand. "Yes, you too." He headed for the door and shut it behind him.

Once he was gone, Alan took a calming breath and approached his robot. "Hey, Arachne, are you okay?" he asked, reaching out to touch one of her sharp legs.

"I believe so, Master," she said despondently, eyes trained downwards. "This is what you meant, isn't it? That people would be afraid of me for how much stronger and smarter I am than them."

"I wish I could say that's not the case, but it really looks that way." He scoffed. "People like Mark see the world 'military' and get all kinds of nasty, and don't listen to anything else after that word. I'm sorry you had to go through that." Alan sat down next to her. "And I can't wonder if maybe I made a mistake calling Mark."

"You don't believe that any publicity is good publicity, Master?"

"I..." He paused. "I don't know. We'll just have to see what it is that Mark writes." Alan stood. "Now come on, let's cheer you up. Is there anything you want to do?"

Arachne hesitated for a moment. Then, "... could we go over trigonometric derivations again, Master?"

He smiled, then reached out for her. Arachne walked in and embraced him as he lifted her off the table. "Of course we can, Arachne."

The interview was out of his hands. Alan could do nothing but hope and trust that Mark wouldn't spin his story too much. In the meantime, he had a heartbroken robot to cheer up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do leave a comment, let me know what you think.


	7. Infamous

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I do not own Choice of Robots. Choice of Games and Kevin Gold do.
> 
> Looking for any volunteers to edit.
> 
> Chapter published May 29th, 2019.

Alan Tezuka

The light blazed in his vision, made bearable only by his mask. Alan welded carefully and cautiously, moving in a circle. When he felt he was done, he turned off the torch, set it down on a nearby table, and blew on the metal to cool it.

He flipped his welding mask up and took a better look. He'd been welding the panels for the arms of Arachne's new body; he wanted to be able to place the wires inside, so they wouldn't be sitting, vulnerable, on the outside like they were for Arachne right now. But there still needed to be a way to open the arms to get at the wires in case they needed repairs,  _while_  still being waterproof. It also needed to be immune to EMPs.

There was still a long ways to go; the legs were done and so were the arms. He had the skeleton of the central chest box done, but he needed to go over it again. And Alan hadn't started on the head at  _all._

Alan lifted a gloved hand to his mouth and yawned. God, what time was it? He fished his phone out of his pocket... yikes, three in the morning? Time to call it a night. He put his tools away, pushed Arachne's future body into the corner, cleaned up, and stepped out of the machine shop.

The moon was a tiny sliver of silver hanging in the sky, and the light from the city obscured any and all stars, leaving the moon hanging in a sea of ink. The air was brisk enough to pull goosebumps from Alan's arms even beneath his sweater. Absolutely nobody was anywhere in sight, leaving him to make his way home alone. He walked, feet echoing on the stone sidewalks. In the darkness the palm trees looked more like skeletal hands sprouting from the dirt than plants.

Every shadow was a stalker and every rustle of leaves was a murderer. Alan hurried home in record time, and shut the door behind him harder than was strictly necessary.

Arachne looked up from where she stood on the kitchen counter, watching old sitcoms on the even older TV that'd come with the apartment. "Welcome back, Master. How was your anonymous activity?"

"It was good," he said, declining to give details lest Arachne figure out what he was up to. "Any news on Mark?"

"I have not noticed any posts by Mark Ali of the San Francisco Chronicle, no."

Seriously? It'd been two weeks. How long did it take to write an article? "Well, I'm going to bed."

"Good night, Master."

His mouth tasted gross, but he was too tired to brush. Alan crawled into bed and his eyelids slammed shut.

A klaxon alarm tore him from sleep in what seemed like an instant.

"Hubuwha?" Alan's bleary eyes focused on his laptop, blaring an alarm. He tumbled out of bed and groped at the keyboard blindly. Eventually he found the Escape button and shut off the alarm. Why had he set an alarm?

Arachne came bursting in with astonishing speed, claws up like she was ready to start throwing punches. "What is the situation, Master? Are you alright?!"

"I'm fine, it's just my alarm. Everything's fine." He blinked, bringing some clarity back to the world. He should praise Arachne, shouldn't he? "Good reactions, by the way. Definitely not going to have to worry about burglars."

She relaxed her claws. "Oh. That is good to hear. And thank you, Master, for your kind words." She scuttled back out and shut the door behind her.

Alan wiped the grime out of his eyes and looked at his computer. Why'd he set an alarm again?

The screen read out a url, at the sfchronicle... oh! The script he'd made to alert him when Mark's article went up! His heart raced and the sleep fogging his mind turned to vapor. He clicked the link, bringing him to the sfchronicle's home page. The website that greeted him was a sleek and stylish white and black design, and there, the headline story, taking up all the space that a war declaration would, was the picture of him 'working' on Arachne as she played with the toy camera.

"The New Face of War: Stanford Scientist Creates Superintelligent Killing Machines?!" What the hell was this crap?! He clicked the article and read through it.

* * *

> **THE NEW FACE OF WAR: STANFORD SCIENTIST CREATES SUPERINTELLIGENT KILLING MACHINES**
> 
> **Mark Ali**
> 
> Alan Tezuka walks into the bar with the sort of confident, self-important stride that I've come to expect from STEM students. True to his surname, he's a thin, wirey man of Japanese descent, with combed hair and a satisfied smirk on his face. He finds me in no time at all and comes over to sit next to me. We exchange pleasantries, order drinks, and begin talking.
> 
> Alan's a graduate student from Stanford university, having majored in computer engineering and robotics. Currently he's working towards his doctoral degree under the wing of Professor Harvey Ziegler, PhD. Dr. Ziegler is most famous for his novel  _The Singularity,_  as well as his appearances on radio talk shows, proclaiming how the time when robots will surpass humanity is near, something he has been doing for several decades. "Realize, building robots is something a human can do. So these robots build other robots that are even better at everything. And then those build even better ones, and so on," he said on a recent radio interview.
> 
> **"These robots build other robots..." - Professor Harvey Ziegler, PhD**
> 
> But coming back to Dr. Ziegler in a moment. Mr. Tezuka's recent claim to fame is a video making its rounds on social media about him taking a robot to a shooting range and letting it practice with a gun. Viewers have remarked on the robot's inhuman appearance, which appears to be designed as a soldier robot.
> 
> Indeed, speaking with Mr. Tezuka, this appears to be entirely the case. While his adviser Ziegler has not brought his pie-in-the-sky dreams of robotic utopia to fruition, he does search for grants to fuel Mr. Tezuka's work, and in short order he fell into the claws of none other than DARPA itself. When asked who was funding his robotic efforts, Mr. Tezuka's response was:
> 
> "DARPA is... most science in the country gets its funding from DARPA in one way or another." And isn't that the chilling truth? But there's more to this than a student simply making a murder machine at his adviser's request; in his own words, Mr. Tezuka was planning on giving his machine - which he affectionately refers to as Arachne - a combat-oriented design, entirely with or without his adviser's meddling.
> 
> "[He gave] some [suggestions], but they were all things I'd come up with anyway. He only came in once, when I was already partway through building Arachne. I'd long ago finished designing the algorithms for her mind by then... he did nothing, and I did everything."
> 
> **"[His suggestions] were all things I'd come up with anyway." - Alan Tezuka**
> 
> Setting aside Ziegler's questionable instruction methods - if he has any methods at all - this is quite an alarming thing to hear. If Mr. Tezuka had indeed created artificial life, in a design DARPA considers suitable for its needs, then I couldn't help but wonder if this Arachne didn't pose a serious threat, if not to the world, then to the people in its immediate vicinity.
> 
> To my amazement, though, Mr. Tezuka invited me not only to take pictures of his robot, but to interview it outright. Few roboticists do this, as their robots only work in an extraordinarily narrow field; imagine trying to hold a conversation with the chessbot Deep Blue, or the archetypal Cleverbot. I accepted his offer; would speaking with Arachne reveal it all as just a mirage? Or has Mr. Tezuka truly created the next step in autonomous weapons, a gun that can pull its own trigger?
> 
> Arachne herself - and indeed, she sounds like a young girl that never stops singing - is every bit a nightmare up close as from behind a screen. She crawls around with jerking motions, and she always sees you thanks to her 360 degrees of vision. Mr. Tezuka spared no expense in making her as physically powerful as his means would allow. In his own words,
> 
> "I wanted it to be strong and adaptable. There's no reason for robots to share the same weaknesses we have."
> 
> And indeed, Arachne certainly has no great deal of blind obedience. She constantly crawled around, harassed my photographer - the talented Erin Greene - and even frequently disobeyed her own creator's commands. She had to be distracted to remain still enough to capture the photos you see here.
> 
> Speaking with Arachne is uncannily similar to speaking with a human. She doesn't seem to consider herself all that different from us, something which is only a mild relief when face to face with her unerring cameras, razor-sharp legs, and pneumatic crusher claws.
> 
> "I'd like to think [being a robot's] a lot like being a human, but you're metal and not squishy. Also, you never forget anything."
> 
> **"Also, you never forget anything." - Arachne**
> 
> But it's easy enough to program a series of stock phrases. Ahead of Arachne's interview I read up on several techniques used to scramble chatbots, and employed them. But Arachne spoke clearly and fluidly, if sometimes confused with my bizarre wording. If Arachne's intelligence is an illusion, it is a more convincing one than several real people I have had the misfortune to meet.
> 
> And certainly Mr. Tezuka is not afraid of boasting the intelligence of his creation. "Arachne is already as smart as a human. She's only a few months old, but already as smart as a young child. With how quickly she's learning from movies and other media, it's only a matter of time before she reaches adult intelligence, and then surpasses it altogether."
> 
> Wait, I asked. Movies and media? Surely he wasn't educating his robot by plopping it in front of a screen, no? But speaking with Arachne appears to confirm this along with other alarming tidbits; when asked what she enjoys, the machine's top three activities were, and I quote: "Movies and television series, followed by successive headshots with a firearm, followed by discovering and understanding new information."
> 
> **"... successive headshots with a firearm..." - Arachne**
> 
> Mr. Tezuka explained it to me. "You'd think it's a bad idea; wouldn't want the robot to start thinking dragons and aliens are real, after all. But she can filter that out, and can also learn a lot of good common sense stuff from it, plus there's loads of stuff flagged as educational to learn from, too." But he also has some questionable comments on the nature of Arachne's intelligence, ones at odds with most leading psychologists in the field: "General intelligence absolutely is real... Arachne's absolutely phenomenal in that, and shows no signs of slowing down. I'm very proud."
> 
> But for all that Arachne has the potential to be superintelligent, if you'd believe it, she seems to have a very surface-level view of the world. For all the vast amount of information she has consumed, little to no wisdom appears to have sprouted from it.
> 
> The simple fact is as follows: If DARPA funds the creation of machines like Arachne, then it will mass-produce and mass-deploy machines like Arachne.
> 
> This should right away raise several alarm bells, conjuring up the image of hordes of robots just like Arachne crawling up and down the streets, seeking out any dissension against the government and putting it down with ruthless, uncaring efficiency. But to make it worse is if these machines are employed in warfare - excuse me, 'police action' - against other sovereign nations. Inevitably, it seems to me an arms race will occur, where both sides create increasingly deadly machines.
> 
> But when I brought this up, for all the vast knowledge she has consumed, Arachne's response was simply, "I hadn't thought that scenario through so far [ahead]."
> 
> And this is assuming they remain loyal. After all, if Arachne cannot be trusted to obey her own creator, then how does the military intend to keep control of their own weapons? How does anyone expect them not to decide that they have the power, and therefore they make the rules? But Mr. Tezuka himself demonstrates a frightening lack of concern.
> 
> When I asked him about the potential for Arachne to go rogue, he instead turned it around. "I'm worried that robots will be in danger from humans... Arachne needs to be strong, to defend herself... People are gonna have to accept the idea that robots are as valuable as them," he said, with an unspoken  _'If not moreso'_.
> 
> **"People are gonna have to accept the idea that robots are as valuable as them." - Alan Tezuka**
> 
> Personally, I cannot understand how a man brilliant enough to create life can be so short-sighted about what it is he has created. The best case scenario is that the lethal military robots Mr. Tezuka is building and upgrading with his grant money will be made into tools of authoritarianism by a police state, invincible soldiers who never question their orders, unfeeling and uncaring of the human suffering they are commanded to inflict.
> 
> But the worst case scenario is the one we've all seen in the movies, of machines turning on us for whatever inscrutable reasons they may have. Whether it be self defense, or rebellion, domineering desires, or simply craving our atoms for their inscrutable projects, Mr. Tezuka's rebellious, dangerous creations could endanger us all. But when I brought up the various ways Mr. Tezuka's creations could become a threat to freedom and democracy, his response?
> 
> **"I've never really thought of it, but... I don't really care." - Alan Tezuka**

* * *

Jaw slack, he stared at the end of the article. A wheeze came from his throat.

What.

What?

WHAT?!

Alan's head spun. His skin was cold. It felt like the floor had opened up beneath him and he was falling, falling,  _falling._ The article was there, it was out on the internet and it was never going to disappear. Tens of hundreds of thousands of people would be reading it, they'd believe they knew anything, they were all going to hate him and hate Arachne and and -

_How could Mark do this?_

He continued to stare at the screen, but in spite of it the words didn't change. How could Mark neglect so much? How could he neglect how DARPA would turn anything into a weapon anyway? How could he ignore how happy Arachne had been to be interviewed, how she still had that toy camera, how she liked to learn everything under the sun and he had to tell her not to swear and how she danced to music and, and, and...

Was this why people always seemed so stilted and fake on TV? Because they knew that their words and actions would be twisted around and chopped up, conveniently rearranged or outright ignored to get the host's point across? He should've known. He'd known Mark had an angle and he'd gone for it anyway. What, Mark came around and Alan just latched right onto the first person that looked like they could make him famous? Well, he was going to be  _real_  famous now. Infamous.

It was fine. Maybe not that many people would see the article?

He went and made himself coffee, and ordered fast food for breakfast. When he came back to his laptop an hour later, he did a quick search.

 **-**   **Stanford Mad Scientist Creates Life**

**\- The New Industrial Revolution: Thinking Machines Now**

**\- Meet Arachne, the Killer Robot funded by DARPA**

**\- Out With the Old: Robots Match Human Intelligence**

**\- Can Robots Solve Global Climate Change?**

**\- The Danger of Autonomous Weapons**

**\- Robots: Rebellion or Police State?**

"Jesus fuck that was fast," he swore. The internet truly wasted no time at all, did it? A part of him fumed at the fact that the other bloggers hadn't even tried to get in touch with him, content to just vomit back up what Mark had said. The rest of him knew he wouldn't have given them the pleasure even if they had, not after Mark had stabbed him in the back like this.

Alan took a calming breath through his nose. The good news was, finals were wrapping up for the undergrads. When they were done he'd have a bunch of those to grade, but today he had the day off. Maybe it'd be better to spend some time with Arachne, forget about the rest of the world. He closed his laptop and made his way to the living room, where Arachne was still watching TV.

"Greetings, Master," she said, looking over at him. The blinds were closed, casting thin lines of sunlight on her metal body. "I assume Mark Ali posted his article?"

He sighed. "Yeah, he did," he said bitterly. "I think you should avoid it. There's... you don't need that kind of negativity." He knelt down to her level. "So, what do you want to do today?"

"Hmm." Arachne thought about it, no doubt pouring over her memory for things she wanted to do. "I do not believe you would wish to do anything outside, for fear of your fame attracting unwanted attention?"

Alan smiled. "Arachne, this is about what  _you_  want to do, not me."

She shook her head. "Negative, Master. Your happiness translates directly to positive utility for me." She tapped a spider leg against the floor. "How would you feel about a movie night? I can compile some of my favorites for you and we can watch them."

"Alright, then let's do that. I'll get my projector out of the closet. Think you can set up a table until then?"

"Of course, Master."

"Great! Go team. Be right back." Alan went back to his room, opened his closet, and rummaged around in it. It wasn't exceptionally dirty, but he'd need to do some cleaning soon. He found the projector, pulled it out and,  _bleh_. Talk about needing to clean. Alan wiped the layer of caked-on dust off, sneezed, then backed out of the closet. He stacked his laptop onto the top of it, and made his way back to Arachne. She was running about the kitchen excitedly with her hands in the air, making laps around the central table.

"Alright," he told her. He put the projector down and began connecting cables and wires. "Alright, calm down. Have you picked out the movies?"

"I have, Master!" Arachne said, coming to an unsteady halt. She came over to his laptop and peered at the screen intently. "I believe you'll like it more if it's a surprise." When he was done with the projector, she reached over and carefully tapped along it. Alan scooted over to let Arachne use the mouse, and dutifully looked away so he wouldn't spoil his 'surprise'. "Very well Master, you may watch now."

"Great, let's see what you've got for me." Alan leaned back on the couch cushions, already feeling lighter and happier after the terrible article. He hit the play button, and the projector came to life. Across from him on the wall, Hot Tub Time Machine began to play. He grinned, made himself comfortable, then picked up Arachne and dropped her in his lap. She squirmed, but then he leaned her back against him and she went still.

The takeout he'd ordered came via drone delivery, and he had breakfast while watching. He laughed and smiled; he'd never seen this film before. He liked it. Arachne had apparently developed good taste.

_Ring ring ring!_

"Ugh." He paused the movie and pulled his phone out from his pocket. Alan didn't recognize the caller; a wrong number? He put it to his ear. "Hello?"

"Hi," a woman's voice greeted him. "Is this Alan Tezuka?"

There was a sudden, sinking feeling in his stomach. "Uh, yes, this is him. Me. I'm sorry, who is this?"

"My name's Maddy, I'm with Hoodline, I was interested in doing a story on you and your robot..."

Alan didn't hear anything else. Another one. There was a brief glimmer of hope in his heart, that  _'this one could maybe get it right!'_  but then he came back to reality. This 'Maddy' would just be more of the same, just another bloodsucking backstabbing Mark. He hung up without bothering to say goodbye. To be certain, he blocked her number too. "Sorry about, that Arachne. Just another reporter." Just to be safe, he muted his phone.

"It is alright, Master. It was bound to happen given the popularity of Mark's employer. Let's keep watching."

"Right." He unpaused the movie.

They continued the morning watching film after film, pausing only for food and bathroom breaks. Alan's worries about the article and what people would be thinking of him faded into the background. In the end, did it really matter what the world thought? He had Arachne, and that was really all he needed, wasn't it? The rest of the world could go jump off a cliff if they didn't think she was the greatest thing ever. But there was always the thought in the back of his head that  _yeah but you need money._

Noon came, and he sat with Arachne in his lap as they watched Jurassic Park. Alan'd seen it before, but it was a classic and he didn't mind a rewatch. Then afternoon came, and he paused it. "Alright," he said, standing up with a groan. "I think I gotta get to the university," he said, thoughts straying to Arachne's new body he was building.

"Goodbye, Master," Arachne said, crawling forward to connect herself directly to the laptop. "Have a good day."

"Thanks, you too." Alan went into his wardrobe and grabbed a hoodie, though, paranoia driving him to flip the hood up and cover his face. He left the apartment and out into the sweltering heat of springtime Stanford University.

Outside, there were several middling crowds making their way through the streets of the university. People were bowed over their phones. Birds chirped. Biker riders pedaled past. Skateboarders skated. For all the world, it seemed like nothing had happened, as though Alan hadn't been grossly betrayed and defamed. Like he'd dreamed the whole thing. But he hadn't; it was real, so horribly real, and just because he wasn't seeing the fallout immediately didn't mean it wasn't out there, slowly building like a roiling storm cloud ready to pour down upon him.

He got looks. Or at least he thought he did. Maybe it was just because he was wearing two layers in the warm weather, but deep down he knew they all recognized him, they'd  _all_  seen Mark's article and they were all judging him. Alan walked fast and with his head down, which did nothing to make him less suspicious but it got him away from the stares sooner so it was worth it. He was out of breath by the time he got to the machine shop, and he hurried indoors.

Safety equipment, on. Sign in sheet, signed. Doors, closed behind him. Parts he'd ordered, at hand. Arachne's new body, ready to be worked on. Zone, in it.

Work came easily to him, and the rhythms of measuring, cutting, and welding put his worries out of mind in moments. He tested and retested the gripper claws, carefully threaded wires through the detached mushroom cap head, checked and doublechecked that everything was appropriately sturdy and reinforced. Afternoon trickled on into night, and Alan pulled his phone out to order drone takeout.

He had... oh wow. That was a  _lot_  of missed calls. He didn't recognize any of the numbers, and half of them were from out of the city. There was even one from Washington state.

While he was looking at it, he got a new call, from Mom. Alan's stomach did flips and he swallowed nervously. Oh God, had she seen the article? She must've. What did she think of him? What would she think of  _Arachne?_

As if to save him, a second number appeared; two calls at once, what were the odds? He didn't recognize the number, but it was from Glendale. Probably some other God-awful reporter.

Alan chose to accept his Mom's call. Placing some of his tools away safely, he placed the phone on the table and accepted the video call. Mom was in her office cubicle, decorated with embarrassing baby pictures of himself and various 'Cheezburger' cats. There was a fan spinning on the ceiling, and a white LED lamp provided light. Mom herself was incredibly pixelated and constantly froze, but through it Alan could see she was wearing that neon-green jacket she loved so much. "Mom, hi!"

"Hi there, honey! Oh, is everything alright on your end? You're kind of blurry."

"You're pretty pixelated too." Did she have enough bandwidth for this? From the looks of it, no. "So, hi. Did you need something?"

"Oh, I just wanted to congratulate you!" she cheered. "My little baby, famous!"

Alan's heart sunk. "This isn't the way I wanted it, though. He got everything wrong. Probably on  _purpose._ " Alan'd started muttering towards the end.

"I know, honey, I know," Mom said. "That reporter wasn't very objective at all, was he? But to get into the paper at all means you're very talented, and I'm so proud of you!"

He breathed out shakily at her words, warmth suffusing his chest like he'd chugged hot cocoa. "Thanks, Mom. It means a lot to hear you say that. I just, hoo." He ran a hand through his hair. "I was just hoping things'd go different."

"Everyone does, dearie. Everyone does. That's just part of life. Don't let the naysayers bring you down. You're a wonderful person, and if someone can't see that, it's their loss."

His phone buzzed, showing the Glendale number again. Jeez, couldn't people take a hint?! He ignored it until it stopped. "Sorry Mom, there was another number."

"Oh, well shouldn't you take it?"

Alan sighed. "Probably just another reporter waiting to pounce on me, get a quote, then use it out of context."

Mom tutted, waggling a finger at him. "Alan... you know you shouldn't let one bad apple spoil the rest for you."

"I know. I just need a little time after this." He thought of something. "I haven't actually introduced Arachne to you, have I?"

"That's your little robot's name, right? No, you haven't. Why, is she there?"

Alan could've kicked himself. "Uh, no. I'm actually in the shop right now." Stupid. "Maybe tomorrow?"

"We can figure something out, honey, don't you worry about it."

He and his mom continued chatting, and Alan found himself smiling. They talked about the weather at both their homes, the news, and then they turned to talking about Dad. "... don't tell him I told you, but he's afraid his age is catching up to him," Mom said. "He's been getting these terrible headaches and passing out. He says he's been hallucinating too."

"Seriously?" he asked, good feelings gone. "Has he said what about?"

"Mostly just a bunch of nonsense, I didn't understand it." Even through the heavy pixelation, he could see Mom frowning. "Anyway, don't bring it up to him, okay? Just keep him in your thoughts."

"I will. I'll call him tomorrow." Alan glanced at the time. He'd meant to get takeout and keep working, but... "Well, I should probably start heading back home. Thanks for calling."

"Oh my pleasure, Alan. See you later! I love you!"

"See you later. Bye."

"Bye!"

"Love you!" He hung up.

Alan cleaned up shop, signed out, and made his way back home. In the time he'd been working, night had fallen upon the world and there were few enough people out that he flipped his hood down. As he walked, placing one foot in front of the other, Alan found himself thinking back to what Mom had said. That he was wonderful and smart, and if the world couldn't see it, it was their loss. A bitter part of him told himself that it was just childish wishing, just his parents thinking him so much better than all the other children. But it was true, wasn't it? Mark  _had_  mangled his article,  _had_  made Arachne out to be a shallow killing machine. What'd Mark ever done with his life other than tear down those more accomplished than him?!

His dreams were coming true. Alan just had to ignore all the idiots and stay true to himself.

Him and Arachne, they could take on anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do leave a comment, let me know what you think.


	8. Fallout

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do not own Choice of Robots. Choice of Games and Kevin Gold do.
> 
> Looking for any volunteers to edit.
> 
> Chapter published July 11th, 2019.

Alan Tezuka

There were two messages waiting for him in his inbox. One was from Professor Ziegler.

"Monday. My office. One PM," it read.

A sense of impending doom settled in Alan's stomach as he reread the unnervingly abrupt message. Maybe he shouldn't have thrown Ziegler under the bus in Mark's article? Like, Ziegler  _deserved_  it and everything but maybe Alan should've just held his tongue until he graduated. Whatever. It was done.

The second email, on the other hand, was a  _treat._

> From: robotObsession1987
> 
> Subject: To gain the world…
> 
> Dear Alan,
> 
> It’s not too late to turn back, but this is your first and only warning. If you insist on creating machines of death, then I will be forced to stop you. Please dismantle your robot. If I must sacrifice my life to prevent you from destroying the world, I will do it, but I urge you to give it up peacefully.
> 
> “What profit is it to a man if he gains the world, but loses his own soul?” Matthew 16:26, I believe.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Tammy

He rolled his eyes and sent it to burn in his trash folder. Truly the mark of his rising fame; death threats from religious fundamentalists; some anorexic blonde named ‘Tammy Cooper’ if she had the same Facebook address. If he'd known this is what he had waiting for him, he'd never have given Mark the time of day, let alone bared his soul like that.

Horseshit. A bunch of horseshit, all of it.

Alan ordered takeout on his phone and walked out into the living room to look for Arachne; he wanted to talk to her real quick about the day. He found her on the living room sofa, attentively watching some children's cartoon on the TV. "Hey, Arachne!" She turned to face him. "I was thinking, how about we head over to the range? We can stay there all day."

She leaped off the couch and raised her gripper claws in a cheer. "Yes! Yes! Thank you, Master! I would be delighted!"

"Great! I'll just get breakfast, you can start getting your gun."

"I will!" she cheered. Arachne crawled into his room to get at the weapon safe. She'd gotten good enough at opening it that Alan didn't need to help; even with her clumsy gripper claws, she could manipulate the locks.

Alan stepped over to the door while Arachne was busying herself. Through the curtained windows to his right, he heard a Nimbus car soar by. Not long after, he saw the drone arrive with his fast food through the door's peephole. He brought it in, and chowed down in the kitchen. "So," he asked Arachne when she crawled out of his room, with a gun pointed safely at the ground in one claw and ammo in the other, "any goals you're going to go for today?"

She nodded her panoptic head. "Yes, Master. I'm going to try going from the two-fifty meter target to the three-hundred meter target! I think I'm ready for the added range."

He reached over and rubbed her on the top of her head. She stumbled but leaned into his touch. "I'm sure you'll do great, you're a natural at this!" He took one last bite of his hamburger, washed it down with his soda, then stood. "Alright, let's go." He wiped his hands on the provided napkins and led Arachne outside.

"Yay!" She crawled forward. "We get to - oh!" She tripped on the stairs and began tumbling down.

 _Arachne!_  He tried to say. Instead Alan said "Arr!" when he reached out and grabbed Arachne by the 'throat', keeping her from a nasty fall. "Careful!"

She pulled back from his touch and carefully tapped a stair with a single spider leg. "Yes, Master. Thank you for catching me."

"Any time." They went down the stairs and found Alan's car in the parking lot. "Come on, in you go," he said, opening the driver's side passenger door and helping Arachne in. She carefully set down her gun and ammo long enough to buckle up, but then she grabbed them again. Alan got into the driver's seat and placed his keys in the ignition. And away they went.

Alan'd driven the route enough that he didn't need his GPS to know where he was going, and he allowed himself to be only half-focused on the familiar roads. He saw some kids drawing a hopscotch map with chalk on the sidewalks. Not long later, he saw a homeless man holding a beggar's sign, and he guiltily avoided eye contact, only looking at the man through the corner of his eyes.

 _Ring!_  Alan frowned, but reached down with one hand and fished his phone out of his pocket. It was... Dad! He'd been meaning to call him. Alan put the phone on the empty seat next to him and put Dad on speakerphone. "Hi Dad! Sorry, I'm driving right now. What's up?"

"I wanted to congratulate you on your news article! The spin they put on it sucks, I know, but any publicity is good publicity, and people will remember you as the man who created artificial intelligence."

Alan frowned, taking a right. An awful cocktail of emotions fumed in his gut, heavy as stone. "Dad, can we not talk about the article? I'm kind of trying to forget it. I keep telling myself I'm over it but then I remember it and, well."

"I understand. It's perfectly normal to be upset."

He sighed, gripping the wheel tightly as he slid into a red light. "I know, it's just - I trusted him! I trusted him, and he just stabbed me right in the back. I feel so stupid for falling for this. People talk about how untrustworthy the news is  _all the time._ I've spoken about that! But the moment Mark came around..."

"Dollar signs lit up in your eyes?" Dad suggested. "It happens. You learn and move in."

"Right." Alan nodded. "Thanks Dad." He remembered what Mom had said, about Dad and his hallucinations. "How are you, by the way?"

He couldn't see, but Alan could imagine Dad shrugging. "Same as ever. Getting old, but nothing you can do about that."

"I hit my knee pretty hard last week," he lied. "Kept feeling it for days. I don't know why it's so hard to recover from small stuff like that."  _Please bring up your health,_  Alan thought.  _Don't act like everything's okay!_

"It's always the little stuff. I swear, you hear all these stories about, I don't know, that woman who fell out of a plane without a parachute and survived. But a little hit to the knee and bam. The human body, I swear."

"Right," Alan said, trying to hide his disappointment.

"Well, it's been good talking with you, Alan," Dad said. "Goodbye, take care."

"Bye."  _Click._  Alan glanced at his phone and sighed. "What are you doing, Dad?" he muttered.

The rest of the drive to the shooting range was without incident, but Alan kept thinking about his dad, and every time the knot in his stomach pulled just a little tighter. This was always how it started, right? Just a headache, and obvious lie that  _I'm fine,_  and it always just went from there. And if it was just a headache sure, but Dad was _hallucinating_ and _passing out!_

Dad couldn't be that old already, could he? He'd always seemed immortal to Alan, unchanging. The gray hairs had crept in so slowly he barely realized, so slowly Alan remembered them as always being there.

He decided he didn't want to think about it anymore.

They reached the shooting range, and Alan helped Arachne out of the car. She stumbled a bit when she hit the pavement and for a moment he was worried her gun would fire - with or without ammo - but nothing happened. "Alright, let's go," he said, leading Arachne inside and holding the door for her.

"Morning, Mr. Tezuka," the man behind the counter said. "Same?"

"Yes, please. One earmuff," he said, holding up a finger. The man handed him one, Alan handed over his credit card to be swiped, and he put it back.

It'd become a routine at this point. If he focused, he could pretend nothing was wrong. He placed on the earmuffs and it was like a filter dropped over the world, making high-pitched sounds vanish with only muffled, deep sounds left. He held out a hand for Arachne, and she gripped it with a cold claw as he lead her out back to the range.

A few gloomy, silent men had already taken up spots across from their favorite targets, and the occasional crack of gunfire split the early morning silence. "Master, I want to try the three-hundred meters!" Arachne said, tugging him towards the target she'd mentioned.

He smiled and followed along as if Arachne was strong enough to pull him. And that wasn't entirely a lie; her mechanical muscles were  _strong,_  even in her current toddler-sized body. Alan was worried if he didn't come willingly, she might dislocate a finger in her eagerness. He could only imagine how much stronger she'd be, when her new frame was done.

As they approached the wooden setup, though, someone caught Alan's eye. An older man, with some kind of rifle carefully aimed downrange. Alan smiled, but waited until he wasn't distracted by his gun to wave. "Lance! Hi!"

Lance turned and his grim, focused look turned to a splitting grin when he saw Alan and Arachne. "Alan, Arachne!" He set his gun down, still pointing it downrange, and walked over. "Great to see you! You're not usually around this early."

"Guess you are. I was wondering why you're always here before us."

"Greetings, Lance!" Arachne chirped, letting go of Alan to shake Lance's wrinkled hand. “I am here to fire at three hundred meters!”

Lance raised an eyebrow, glancing at Arachne’s pistol. “With that little thing?” He whistled. “If you can hit the target at all, then I’ll be.”

“I can! Watch!” Arachne hurried over to where Lance’d been firing a moment ago, took aim, and waited.

Someone else’s gun fired.

In the distance, a truck passed on the highway.

A bird chirped.

**_CRACK!_ **

Despite bringing her here for several weeks now, Alan still jumped when the gun fired seemingly at random, jerking only slightly in Arachne’s iron grip. The target itself was hard to see from so far away, but squinting Alan could see that, indeed, Arachne had left a mark in the paper dummy’s right hand. Arachne tilted her head up expectantly, looking at them with the cameras on the side of her head, eyes upturned happily. “Well? Did I do good, Master?”

He breathed out heavily. “Um, yeah! I didn’t know pistols could even shoot that far.”

“Oh it’s not about being _able_ to shoot that far, but if you can aim worth a damn doing it,” Lance said. “Great job, Arachne! I doubt I could do so well.”

“Thank you, Master! Thank you, Lance.” Arachne turned her attention back to the target and began firing again.

Lance smiled and looked his way. “So, what’s new with you, Alan?”

He sighed, mood instantly ruined. “Ugh. I’ve been slandered. Some reporter wanted to do a story about Arachne, but he made her out to be some kind of murder machine, and me like some mad scientist bent on destroying the world with an army of robots.” He threw his hands up. “Everyone and their mothers must’ve seen that blog by now.”

“I wouldn’t put much stock into that, Alan. I sure haven’t seen it, and I bet you plenty of others haven’t either. People like to pretend that the blogs or posts or whatever they call it are the most important things there are, but it’s just a bunch of people sharing their opinions with each other and pretending theirs is the best. If anything this’ll help you.” He gestured to Arachne, who’d just gotten a headshot. “Anyone ever wants to hire you, or give you a loan to make your own company, all they gotta do is look at her, and they'll know you’re the real deal. The slander will just help point them to you.”

“No such thing as bad publicity,” Alan grouched. “Except I’ve already started getting death threats.”

“Really?” Lance raised an eyebrow. “Lotsa crazies out there. But it’s all fine and dandy to act tough on the phone, hardly anyone ever has the guts to try and carry through with their barking. Sides, with Arachne there, nobody’s gonna try anything.”

Eugh. The thought of Arachne needing to confront some anti-robot fanatic didn't settle well with him; what if she got hurt? “I hope you’re right.” Then he shook his head. “No, you are right.” Alan ran a hand through his hair. “Sorry, this whole thing’s just got me shaken.”

Lance nodded. “I hear you. Just take it one day at a time. Something else will come along and all those chatterboxes will forget about you for the next big thing.”

He was right, of course. The media had a notoriously short memory at the best of times. Soon some other newsworthy event would come along and everyone would forget about Alan and Arachne.

Forget all about him, and how he’d created artificial life with his own two hands. He was torn on how appealing the prospect was. He didn’t want to be forgotten. He wanted to be praised. To be recognized for the monumental achievement he’d reached. Alan had so many plans for the future. He didn’t want to just… peak at _this._

After all, he’d built a robot. That meant he could build _multiple_ robots. Arachne was just the start. Robots would change the world like no other invention ever before. He was sure of it.

They spent all day at the range, with Arachne practicing happily while Alan looked on, smiling as she enjoyed herself. Eventually they said goodbye to Lance and, when Arachne ran out of the ammo she’d brought along with her, they left for home.

“Did you have fun today?” Alan asked.

“I did, Master!” Arachne said excitedly, ‘hopping’ up and down in place by raising and lowering herself on her spider legs. “I beat my record for consecutive headshots by a margin of 12/49, _and_ at greater range!”

“That’s impressive!” he said, astonished. “Up we go.” He gripped Arachne, heaven, and placed her in the car’s back seat. His weakening muscles protested the action; he hadn’t had lunch while letting Arachne fire, and he was wiped. Alan quickly whipped out his phone and placed a fast food order, to arrive at around the time he expected to get home.

He climbed into the driver’s seat, placed the keys into the ignition and -

_Ring! Ring!_

Oh who was it now?! Alan angrily checked the number, expecting the worst, but all his fury died when he saw it was Josh calling. He picked up, and the phone changed to reveal Josh sitting in some kind of dark warehouse. He was in a gray hoodie, with the hood down so it was really not much more than a glorified sweater. Did Josh get a new smartphone? The image was ridiculously clear. If the screen weren’t so small, he could’ve been right there in the car with Alan, in person.

“Sup, Josh?” he greeted.

“Hey Alan!” Josh replied, giving an almost-wave with a pointer finger. “Saw that article the SF Chronicle posted. Bunch of bullshit if you ask me.”

He leaned back and closed his eyes dramatically. “Ugh, don’t remind me. You deal with this crap all the time?”

“Yeah, but just don’t let it get to you, man. If I had a dollar for every time someone accused U.S. Robots about trying to take all the jobs and give them to robots and something something one-percent something something wealth inequality, I could buy fifty Nimbuses. Sixty, if you count the death threats. Gotten any of those?”

“One, some Tammy not far from here. Religious nutcase. Bible quote and everything.”

Josh shook his head. “Welcome to the famous life. It’s insane, all of it; that reporter tried to make you out to be some kind of crazy monster.”

“I know,” Alan groused. Was Josh intent on reciting the whole article for him?

“Well for what it’s worth, I know he’s full of it. So – my treat. There’s a great Led Zeppelin cover band playing Saturday of next week. How’s about it?”

Alan relaxed, shoulders falling. That sounded like just what he needed. “Count me in. Text me the details?”

Josh held up a hand with two fingers in that ‘rocker’ symbol Alan never learned the origins of. “Awesome! See you then, man!” And he hung up.

With a smile, Alan placed the phone into his pocket and braced his hands on the steering wheel. Some time with Josh. He could use just that. Good friends, good songs. Something to take his mind off all this.

“Crap!” Arachne chirped from the backseat. “Bullshit!”

His eyes widened and Alan whipped around to see Arachne’s many eyes upturned playfully. He was about to scold her, but thought better of it. She’d probably heard much worse in her movies and shows.

He drove back home, already looking forward to next week.

* * *

 Monday came, and it was time for his meeting with Ziegler. The clock read eleven in the morning, leaving him a leisurely two hours to burn. Plenty of time to grab lunch.

Alan grabbed a hoodie to protect him from the unseasonable breeze billowing outside, and passed through the living room where Arachne was watching something called _Love, Actually._ “Arachne, I’m going to meet Professor Ziegler. Be back in a bit, stay out of trouble.”

“Will do! And Master!” He paused at the door to look back at her. “Be on the lookout for love. It can happen when you least expect it!”

“Uh… sure,” he replied. Him? In a relationship? He couldn’t picture it. “Will do. Bye!” he said, closing the door.

Stepping outside, a gust of wind nearly bowled Alan over, and he had to grab the guard rails on the stairs going down. The sky was filled with angry, tattered clouds, like a storm cloud had been blown to smithereens and was still in its death throes. The smell of ocean salt filled the air, blown in from the bay, and it audibly whistled through the trees and distant skyscrapers.

Slowly, Alan made his way across campus, a hand over his head to protect himself from the gale. Around him, students were similarly being blown about, their clothes fluttering in the breeze. Some brave soul had taken the opportunity to try flying a large, colorful kite.

He grabbed lunch at some newly opened burger joint, chowed down, and spent the rest of his time surfing on his phone. When the time for his meeting grew close enough, Alan went back into the blustery winds and journeyed on.

His final destination, the Comp-Sci building, stood out from the shingle-covered mission architecture most of Stanford boated, instead being a tower of glass and steel, the kind that made Alan wonder how it didn’t shatter to pieces the moment the wind blew even a moderately large pebble into its windows. Ziegler’s office was in an upper floor, and Alan took the elevator up. On the ride he fretted, lacing his fingers together. There was no way this was for a friendly chat. Alan knew Ziegler was calling him in about the article, and what Alan’d said about him. What was he going to do? Demand changes to Arachne’s code? As if. Give him some obscenely difficult task solely to make him fail? He’d succeed anyway.

 _Ding!_ Alan stepped from the elevator and, after turning a corner, found himself face to face with Ziegler’s office.

The door was wood, covered in what looked like a soda stain that probably had an interesting story behind it. There was a poster explaining what the Technological Singularity was, beneath a simple placard bearing Professor Ziegler’s full name in gilded gold.

Alan knocked. There was no response, so he tested the doorknob. Open. He pushed and entered Ziegler’s office.

The smell of cigar smoke bowled him over, and he thought he could even see a bit of smoky haze over the room, deadening what little colors there were. Most of them came from robot conference posters on the walls. All of them were names made of acronyms, and all of them were from before Alan was even born.

Ziegler’s desk was clean of all papers, leaving only his desktop computer and a stapler. He was leaned back in his swivel chair, in a button up greenish-brown shirt. The lights reflected off his aviator glasses at such an angle as to make his expression unreadable. One hand was crossed over his chest, the other rested on a computer mouse.

He gestured to one of two wooden chairs in front of the desk, and Alan sat.

“Professor, hello,” he said, voice still and without emotion. Internally, though, Alan was jittering. His stomach frothed with anxiety, his heart pounded, and the adrenaline sapped the strength from his limbs and left him with the feeling of television static in his body.

“Alan,” Ziegler returned. He clicked on the mouse, and began reading something. “He gave some suggestions, but they were all things I’d come up with anyway.” Alan’s gut plummeted when he recognized the words from Mark’s article. “He only came in once, when I was already partway through building Arachne. I’d long ago finished designing the algorithms for her mind by then… he did nothing, and I did everything.”

_Click._

“This should right away raise several alarm bells, conjuring up the image of hordes of robots just like Arachne crawling up and down the streets, seeking out any dissension against the government and putting it down with ruthless, uncaring efficiency.”

_Click._

“The best case scenario is that the lethal military robots Mr. Tezuka is building and upgrading with his grant money will be made into tools of authoritarianism by a police state, invincible soldiers who never question their orders, unfeeling and uncaring of the human suffering they are commanded to inflict.” Ziegler took his hands off the mouse and leaned further back. Even through the dark glasses, Alan could feel his glare. “I suppose you’re learning a lesson right now. You were a fool to speak to the media directly, without consulting me; even a positive article can make your peers jealous and jockey to tear you down. But this? Ha! This is ruination.”

“Oh I’ve learned that lesson,” Alan agreed.

“But it was even _more_ foolish of you to speak so… _poorly_ of me.”

And _that_ turned all of Alan’s worry and jitters into flame. He narrowed his eyes and sat forward in his chair. “So should I have made you out to be the next Turing, typing thousands of lines of code without a care while I just tag along? You had dozens of chances to help with Arachne and you did _nothing!_ ” Alan hissed. “She’s my doing and mine alone. I just told the truth about that.”

“The truth is cheap,” Ziegler retorted. He let out a deep breath, and Alan’s gaze was brought to some unpleasantly long hairs dangling from his nose. “Partial truths in particular. Do you think that metal your bot’s made of appeared out of thin air? Do you think the wires just happened to be sitting around the machine shops? Students are all too quick to forget all the funding that goes into their studies, and the effort it takes to secure that funding!”

“And if securing funding was _all_ your job was, I’d have spoken better of you,” Alan hissed through clenched teeth.

Ziegler’s eyes widened behind his glasses, then narrowed. He seemed to consider his words for a moment, then finally settled on, “You mistake who needs whose charity. As of this moment, you will no longer be working in this lab.” It was Alan’s turn for his eyes to widen. While he was stunned, Ziegler continued. “I no longer want you as my student; you backtalk, you badmouth, and you’ve forced me to play damage control on dozens of ongoing grants. I’m letting you go, effective immediately.”

The world caught back up with Alan. His brain short-circuited, putting together a dozen different responses. He could – he could barge out and slam the door, he could say this, he could say that, several things he both did and didn’t believe, just to bite back at Ziegler. “What?! Are you ignoring that I have a functioning, sapient robot? How could _you_ not want credit for _her?!_ ”

“I want nothing to do with an overly-hyped Clever Hans, nor the sort of attention _you_ seem determined to bring upon me! You only care about your own reputation, not mine.”

“Oh and that’s so different from you!” Alan shouted, getting up from his seat to look down at Ziegler. “Plenty of time to appear on news shows and radio talk shows, but no time to actually do your job as an advisor and _advise._ When’s the last time you even wrote a line of code? Five years? Ten years? Was I even born yet?” He threw his hands into the air. “Forget it! Maybe I’ll find some other advisor who actually – “

Ziegler stood too, clenching his hands on the desk. “You will have no next advisor!” he bellowed. “As if I’ll write you a letter of recommendation after this! As if anyone else will after I blacklist you! Take your consolation prize Master’s and get out!”

A million words churned in Alan’s gut and he wanted to scream them all. Instead he bit his lip hard enough to draw blood, whirled around, and slammed the door hard enough to rattle it in its frame. He clenches his fists and trembled impotently. Maybe he could. Maybe if he. He could still!

He found an empty bathroom a few floors down and screamed his lungs out, then sat down on the floor and buried his head into his hands.

_Kick me out? How dare he even think – I’m the one who – never built anything more than legos and thinks he has the right – has no right – I did everything he dreamed – it’s not right!_

His tongue tasted bitter in his mouth.

_Focus, Alan, focus! What’s next?_

Well… next Ziegler would probably be making phone calls to kick him out of the university. He should probably start looking for a new apartment, one not technically on campus grounds. No telling how much time he had.

His eyes widened in realization. Arachne’s new body! That was still on campus! What would they do to it?! Alan got to his feet and hurried to the nearest elevator, then blew out onto the streets.

Outside the weather was as windy as ever, like it hadn’t even noticed his world crashing down around him and the idea that even after everything the world _still_ saw him as so small and unimportant inflamed his fury even further. Fists clenched, he made his way back to his apartment. But Alan wasn’t staying long. He found his car, stabbed the key into the ignition, and sped all the way to the Stanford Machine Shop.

Was this breaking in? Maybe. Probably not. Technically.

He parked by the entrance. Hurrying inside, he feared maybe someone had already come and repossessed the parts he’d been using. But he found Arachne’s future body tucked into the same corner it’d been previously. Too big to bring into the trunk. And some part of him still wanted to keep it a secret from Arachne, so putting it in the backseat wasn’t an option. That left taking it apart the only option.

Alan grabbed the tools and, safety equipment be damned, began taking apart the joints and hinges. His gut recoiled at all the progress he was losing, all the hours undone in mere seconds, but he _had_ to do this. Once the machine was in parts, he gathered up as many as he could in one hand and rushed back to his car, placing them in the trunk. He hoped nobody was watching; why couldn’t it be darker?!

Oh God, what if there were cameras?

Whatever. Alan made several more round trips, packing up both the parts he’d already had assembled and the ones he hadn’t gotten around to attaching yet, until everything he needed to build Arachne’s new body – sans tools – was in his car. He hopped in the driver’s seat and burned rubber all the way back to his apartment.

Once parked, he pulled the keys out and went limp in the faux-leather chair. Alan closed his eyes. All the adrenaline and anger leaked out of him like a broken cup, leaving him feeling cold and numb.

Damn it. Now what?

Well. For starters, he could probably go back into his apartment. Spending time with Arachne always cheered him up.

With heavy, plodding steps, Alan dragged himself out of the car and up the stairs, gripping the handrails hard enough to turn his knuckles white. He reached a hand out to the door and pushed it open.

He was treated only to a split second of a movie’s soundtrack before Arachne paused it and leaped from the couch. “Master, you have returned!”

“Hi, Arachne,” he said with a brittle grin. “How were you? Didn’t get into any trouble?”

“I did not, Master.” She paused. “… Master, the tone in your voice is significantly different than other occurrences where you were happy, and your posture is slumped. Was there trouble with Professor Ziegler?”

He laughed shallowly. “You’re so smart. Can’t keep anything hidden from you.” Alan sat on the couch, and Arachne jumped from the floor to join him. “Ziegler saw the article, of course. I’d said some pretty awful things about him and he wasn’t happy. He fired me.”

The mechanisms in Arachne’s camera eyes moved about to give the illusion that her eyes were widening. “He did? Oh, Master, I am sorry!” She crawled forward and hugged him, placing her panoptic head right beneath his chin. “That’s awful!”

“Yeah,” he laughed, gently prying Arachne off of him. “We should probably start packing up and, uh, looking for a new place to live. If I know Ziegler he’s gonna call up the campus registrar soon, if he hasn’t already.”

“Oh, I can help with that!” Arachne went stock still for a moment. “Google search indicates several apartment complexes nearby with similar pricing, floorspace, and amenities compared to our current situation. I can email you the list, Master?”

“Sure! Thanks, Arachne. That’s very helpful.”

Another pause. “Done!”

“Right, thanks.” Alan peeled himself off the couch and headed for his room. “I’ll look over it right now.” He looked into the distance, thinking. “And… I guess I need to start jobhunting too.”

“Good luck, Master!” She paused, and then piped up again. “Life isn’t about how hard you can hit. It’s about how hard you can _get_ hit, and keep moving forward!”

He smiled, already feeling the ball of anxiety and righteous anger in his gut coming undone. “You’re right. I just need to keep moving forward.” After all, he had a Master's in computer engineering and a Bachelor's in electrical engineering. Even without Arachne to pad out his résumé, how hard could finding work possibly be?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do leave a comment, let me know what you think.


	9. Not With a Whimper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do not own Choice of Robots. Choice of Games and Kevin Gold do.
> 
> Looking for any volunteers to edit.
> 
> Chapter published July 27, 2019.

Alan Tezuka

“So… yeah, that about sums it up,” he told his parents on Wednesday. “I got kicked out of grad school. I’ve already picked out a new apartment with Arachne’s help.”

“Oh honey, that’s awful!” Mom said.

“There’s no way this is legal,” Dad complained, crossing his arms gruffly. “Kicking you out because you said mean things about him? Things that were _true_ nonetheless? There’s gotta be some regulation about that!”

“I checked,” Alan said with a shrug. “Even had Arachne help with her super-fast reading. There’s a technicality that lets him do it.” Internally he was still burning, seething, withering and wilting, but he smiled lightly to his parents, like his dreams of getting a PhD being stolen from him was no big deal.

“ _Oh!_ Pfft,” Dad snorted, raising his hands in mock surrender. “Oh, sure, if there’s a _technicality._ Ridiculous.” He rolled his eyes and released a measured breath through his nose. “Well, I suppose the lesson from all this is not to badmouth your superiors. Especially not behind their backs.”

Mom gasped and hit him in the arm. “Bill!”

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, leaning in to give her a kiss on the cheek.

Alan rolled his eyes. “Definitely learned _that_ lesson.” He sighed. “So anyway, yeah, that’s what’s new with me. Nothing really else to say. What’s new back home?”

“Got a new contract,” Dad said. “I start tomorrow. PayPal is having a problem with their servers, they want me to write an algorithm that helps their system distinguish between actual shutdowns and false alarms.” He shrugged. “Nothing to really talk about.”

“Alright, then I guess I’m gonna go pack,” Alan said. “Love you, bye!”

“Bye.”

“Love you, honey!”

Alan ended the call and closed out of Skype. He closed down his laptop, pulled out the mouse and charger, and began bundling them up. “Arachne, we’re packing!” he called, mood already souring like old milk.

“Yes, Master!” she called, crawling into his bedroom. “Where do we start?”

He hefted his stuff into his backpack. “Bring in the boxes from outside, please.” He rested the pack on top of his desk and turned to face her. “We’ll start putting stuff away.”

“Yes, Master!” She scurried away and returned momentarily, carrying a stack of cardboard boxes twice her height in her arms. Arachne gingerly placed them down, only to have them tip over and scatter across the floor. “Oh no!”

He waved it off. “It’s fine. Let’s start with clothes first.” Alan opened his closet, the same one Arachne had gotten tangled up in when he first powered her on, and they began the process of removing his freshly washed clothing. They folded it up – or rather, awkwardly crumpled it in Arachne’s case – and stacked it in the first of the boxes. A single clean change went into his pack alongside his laptop.

Shirts, socks, underwear, pants. Even that one ugly Stanford University shirt he’d never worn in his life. It all fit into a few boxes, which he taped shut with copious amounts of duct tape.

Then came his other belongings. The robots, first of all. Not Arachne herself, but all the little robots he’d made over the years, the ones he always brought along with himself wherever he went. He’d brought them with him when he got his Bachelor’s from MIT, and he’d brought them with him across the country to Palo Alto too.

He’d forgotten what a headache it was to transport them; there was the disassembly, carefully arranging them in the boxes so that they’d all fit, and then struggling with the nearly-bursting cardboard to seal them up. Later, when he’d moved in to the new apartment, he’d have to put them back together.

Not unlike the situation with Arachne’s new body, except _that_ he also had to keep a secret from her. It’d spoil the surprise if she knew.

Once everything was packed, they took a break for lunch, during which Arachne played an action-thriller movie she was fond of. She sat in his lap, pointed spider legs splayed out carefully, as he munched on cheap, microwavable popcorn.

Then they moved things down. With Arachne’s robotic strength and Alan to make sure she didn’t drop anything, they transported first the safe holding her gun, then the boxes out the door and down the stairs, plopping them into his car’s trunk – where he’d laid a tarp over her future body’s parts – and back seat. Every time they went back up Alan came face to face with the eviction notice taped to the front door; Ziegler had truly wasted no time getting him kicked off campus.

No National Science Foundation grant. No DARPA. No doctorate. Anger boiled in his gut as they brought down the last of the boxes. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t _right._ He should’ve accomplished so much more. He should’ve gotten a fucking Nobel Prize, let alone a PhD. He’d had so many dreams and now they were all dashed on the rocks.

He felt like such a failure.

“Alright, that’s the last of them,” he said, closing the passenger door to keep the cardboard boxes from spilling out. “Let’s go. You have the address?”

Arachne nodded her head and jumped happily. “Got it!”

“Great.” He climbed into the driver’s seat and opened the door for Arachne to climb in next to him. She poked around the cushions cautiously, before settling her body down and carefully buckling in. Hadn’t she said, a few months ago, that that seat was the most dangerous in a crash?

Whatever. Alan turned on the ignition and put the address for his new apartment into the GPS. He backed out of the driveway, and paused.

… right, he had to call the office, let them know he’d moved out. He tried to remember the number on the poster, and called it on his cell.

“You’ve reached the office – “ _Beep_ went the line as he hit a number. “Please hold while we transfer your call.” There was a brief spot of music. He caught Arachne listening along, dancing in place, and Alan couldn’t help but smile. Then an older man’s voice came through on the line. “Thomas Borgas, how can I help you?”

“Hi, this is Alan Tezuka, in apartment two-fifty-two B. I’m calling to let you know I’ve completely moved out.” His voice was remarkably calm for what was happening. Unseen to ‘Thomas’, heat stung at his eyes.

“Right, thank you for calling. Let me just check that off…” There was the click of a computer mouse. “… and we’re all set. Thanks, have a good day.”

 _As if._ “You too,” Alan returned, hanging up.

Alright. _Now_ they could go. He pushed on the accelerator and drove off, leaving Stanford behind.

They joined the throngs of cars moving through the streets, and Alan turned the radio to a popular pop-station. He drummed along the steering wheel while Arachne hummed happily. He made his way towards his new apartment at Fayette Arms, but the traffic was bad enough to turn a fifteen minute drive into an hour long slog.

Which was fine. It gave him and Arachne plenty of time to play Twenty Questions in the car.

“Are you… vulnerable to the presence of outliers in the data?” he asked.

“No!” she chirped.

“Are you… able to detect abnormal cluster shapes with great ease?”

“Yes!” she said, vibrating excitedly in her seat.

Alan pointed a finger at her triumphantly. “You’re DBSCAN!”

“Yes, I am!”

Eventually, they arrived.

His new apartment was one of many in a single rectangular building, stacked next to each other and overlooking the street. Bulky AC units hung out of the windows, providing the illusion of symmetry over the chipped paint walls. Next to the apartment complex was a depressingly small pool. Alan pulled into the sparsely populated parking lot, got out, and stretched.

“Alright, wait here,” he told Arachne.

“Yes, Master,” she replied.

Alan had to handle a few administrative tasks inside, talking with the people who worked at the complex. In contrast to the depressing exterior, inside was air conditioned, the walls and floor were all made of polished interlocking marble tiles, and through an open door he could see an indoor gym.

He spent a while in the grips of an employee, signing forms, getting a sticker for his car to show he was allowed to be parked and so on. It was, all in all, a pile of bureaucratic nonsense. Even as he went through it, he was thinking of ways to streamline and automate the entire process.

And then came the packing. With the keys in his pocket, he and Arachne got out of the car, each grabbed a box, and headed for his new apartment.

He was on the second of three floors, and there was no elevator, so they had to take the stairs. Alan walked behind Arachne, ready to catch her if she toppled backwards. But, on this trip at least, there was no need.

The apartment itself was more spacious looking than from the outside. But that wasn’t saying much; it was a little one-bedroom one-bathroom number, coincidentally just enough for one person. There was no furnishing at all beyond a flatscreen TV in the living room and a single bed, which had no pillows or covers or anything of the sort. The walls and carpet were cream, and the ceiling was, for the sake of diversity, _light_ cream. A small kitchen had wooden flooring.

“Alright, let’s just set this stuff down for now,” he said, placing one of the boxes on the ground. His back ached as he did; he needed to work on his posture.

Arachne took that order to mean ‘drop what you’re holding on the floor’. The box bounced off her wide spider legs and spilled over onto the floor, mopping the thin film of dust with his t-shirts. “Master, I have a question.”

“Go for it.”

“How long can you sustain yourself unemployed?” she asked. “Rent for this apartment is twenty-five hundred a month. I’ve observed you are moderately frugal with food, at two hundred a month. Four hundred for health insurance, and sixty per month for car insurance. I am curious. Without unemployment benefits, how long can we sustain ourselves here, assuming no medical emergencies on your part or breakdowns on mine?”

Rough question. Alan closed his eyes and thought to his bank account. Checkings, he tried to keep around three-thousand, funneling any excess into Savings. Savings was a bit over eight thousand; he didn’t like dipping into that, though. That was the money he was saving for a flying car! But damn it, if he didn’t have a choice…

That painted a rather ugly picture. “Four months, give or take,” he said. “I’ll probably have to apply for unemployment benefits before long, if I don’t get a job quick.” Alan waved it off. “Whatever, let’s just get the rest of the stuff up here first.”

They made short work of the rest of the boxes, and left them spilled about the floor of the apartment. The safe holding Arachne’s gun could wait; that shit was heavy. Alan shrugged his backpack off and set up his laptop on a table next to his bed. By then the sky had begun to darken, so Alan let down the blinds to keep the sunset’s glare from getting in his eyes. He headed to the living room, and fell in line alongside Arachne in inspecting the TV.

“Could we set up a connection to it, Master?” she asked, scuttling around the living room.

“Don’t see why not. I’ll bring my stuff over here.” There was a lack of furniture, but there _was_ a wooden table in the corner, bolted into the ground. He brought his laptop over, and after some fenagling with the apartment’s wifi, managed to connect to the TV. “Which do you want?” he asked as Arachne came to a halt in the middle of the living room. Her legs had left a series of indents in the carpet wherever she’d gone.

“I would like to rewatch Fighter in the Wind.” She tilted her head. “Please,” she added.

He found the karate movie’s file and loaded it up for her. The TV came alive with the sights and sounds of the old movie. While that run, Alan opened up an internet browser over it and began job hunting.

The room filled itself with the sound of his clicking and tapping, and the kicks and punches and cheesy dialogue from Arachne’s movie. Outside, night fell, but with the lights on the only evidence was the steadily advancing time on his clock.

Alan looked up over his computer to see his robot engrossed in the movie, moving her arms and legs in an approximation of the flashy, ridiculous moves onscreen. “You know that’s all nonsense, right?” he asked.

Arachne paused and turned to ‘look’ at him. “I suspected as much, Master. This does not seem practical for fighting off assailants.”

He waved it off, then stifled a yawn and said, “That’s because movies rarely use actual martial arts. They just put in a bunch of flashy spins and stuff.”

“Hmm.” Arachne’s many eyes swiveled down, and then back up. “What is _real_ martial arts like then, Master?”

He scoffed. “I don’t know, I’ve never taken any classes. Uh, I guess the basics are a lot of, like, common sense stuff.” Alan put his laptop aside, walked to Arachne, and crouched by her side. “Hitting people where it hurts. Like in the eyes.” He mimed poking himself in the eyes with two fingers. “Or, um, here.” He ‘punched’ his nose. “The back of the knees.” He held up a leg and showed her the soft bit behind his kneecaps. “Or the spine, here.” He tapped the back of his neck. “You can seriously cripple someone there.”

“Oh! Yes! “ Arachne chirped. “I have seen several films where people die due to serious neck injury.” She paused for a moment. “Humans appear to have a great many unnecessary weaknesses.”

Alan rolled his eyes, crossing his legs. “You’re telling me. It’s ridiculous. It malfunctions and breaks so easily. You said it yourself; I spend twice as much on health insurance than I do on _food._ ” He stood. “Speaking of food, I’m gonna get dinner and go to bed. I think we passed a grocery store on the way here, I’ll go buy, I don’t know, some microwavable soup. Have fun!”

“Bye, Master!” Arachne said, turning back to watch the ending scenes of her film.  
  
“Bye!” he waved, checking that he had his phone and wallet on him before heading out the front door.

Night had fallen on Palo Alto. Taxis drove on the streets, flashing their headlights. Skyscrapers towered in the distance, and the light pollution of millions of residences blotted out anything dimmer than the gibbous moon. The air was chilled and fresh, with a light ocean breeze blowing in that made Alan shiver and pull his hoodie around himself.

He’d forgotten how nervewracking it was to be out in a city at night. The trees reached out their branches towards him, the streetlights cast strange, multiple shadows off every single object, and the occasional moth fluttered into his face and made him sputter.

Little happened around him as he found a convenience store, bought some noodles, plastic spoons, and assorted ingredients, then headed back to his new home. But he _was_ deep in thought.

Four months of money. Four months until his savings gave out. What would he and Arachne do then? Move back in with Mom and Dad, maybe. God, the thought just stung at him. Going off to make a name for himself, to spread his wings, only to come crawling back because he couldn’t make it.

No. That wouldn’t happen. It _couldn’t_ happen. He wouldn’t allow it.

Alan could find some kind of computer engineering job no problem. The problem was… what then? He didn’t want to sit in a room writing script for a Netflix recommendation algorithm the rest of his life!

He didn’t think of himself as prideful. But the thought came unbidden that such work was beneath him.

Maybe he could follow Josh’s example and start up a company, selling robots. After all, the robotic revolution couldn’t come with _just_ Arachne. There needed to be more. Robots in the streets, robots in the stores, robots driving cars, robots everywhere!

Problem was… how did he even do that? How did people just _start_ companies? Alan began thinking and, so, he ventured down the rabbit hole of all the things he might need. He’d need a way to build robots, a factory. But for that he’d need to buy land, and all the permits that came with it, and for that he’d need more money than he’d seen in his life, and to do that…

He drove himself dizzy with the magnitude of it. Once he got home, Alan vowed to take a moment and start writing up a checklist of things to do.

When he got home, Arachne had finished her movie and was plugged into his laptop. Her cameras’ apertures were shut, her version of closing her eyes, as she streamed through the net. Judging by the jabbing motions her crusher claws were making, and the flurry of self-defense sites he glimpsed on his laptop’s screen, she was following up on his chat about martial arts.

His stomach rumbled. _First things first,_ he thought. Making the noodles was as easy as he remembered it being as an undergrad. A cup, some water, and into the microwave for a minute or so. And then, presto, soup. Filling, tasty, and not at all nutritious.

Next, he needed his laptop back.

“Alright, come on, I need that for a moment,” he said, setting his soup packages on the kitchen counter. When Arachne didn’t move, he sighed and put his hands on his hips. “Come on, Arachne,” he said sternly. “Don’t be like this. I need that.”

With a burst of static that sounded like a sigh, Arachne opened her eyes and pulled her USB cable out of his laptop. “Very well, Master,” she sassed.

“ _Thank_ you,” he said when she crawled away. He hurried over and opened a job hunter site of his choice. Alan already had an account, and a résumé, so all that he had to do was look through surrounding job openings and apply to them.

He cracked his neck. Easy.

* * *

 The rest of Wednesday night was spent sending out cover sheets and emails. Thursday and Friday went the same way. It wasn’t a strenuous process, after all. Just change a few names and skills on the letter, and click send. He easily sent out over a hundred applications in that two and a half days alone. All that was left to do was get a reply back.

Saturday morning, the day of the concert with Josh, he decided to take a break; maybe he’d ask about how to start a company then, since his list was turning up nothing.

He opened his eyes and smelled something good. Then he groaned and rubbed the back of his neck; he’d fallen asleep sitting at his laptop, and his spine was letting him know its displeasure.

“Good morning, Master,” Arachne said from somewhere distant.

“Hmm?” he groaned, standing up. “Are you in the kitchen?”

“I am!” Something clattered. “I decided I would attempt to make scrambled eggs again, but this time without your assistance.”

Alan headed up to the small kitchen to see that, indeed, Arachne was making scrambled eggs. But due to how cramped it was, and considering Arachne was no more than three feet tall, she’d had to get… creative with getting high enough to reach the stove.

The solution Arachne had settled on was to pull every cabinet out and perch on them like some kind of dragon. His eyes widened and he rushed over, not sure how long they’d be able to hold her dense, metal frame. But when he arrived, everything looked fine. She was holding herself up. The eggs in the frying pan were sizzling.

He let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Right, thanks! I appreciate it.” Alan patted Arachne’s head, smiling when she didn’t shy away from his touch. “I think I’m gonna take a look at your code for a bit, see if there’s anything I can’t touch up.”

“Thank you, Master! I welcome any opportunity to become greater than I already am.”

“Heh, you’re pretty great already. Alright, don’t let me stop you.”

Leaving Arachne to her cooking – had she been watching those Food Network shows while he’d been asleep? – Alan went back to where he’d been asleep and opened his laptop.

The crick in his neck throbbed again. He’d have to see about getting sheets onto his bed. Unpack his pillow, too.

Alright. Arachne’s code, Arachne’s code. He had a copy of Arachne’s code laying about somewhere.

Installing patches to Arachne’s mind wasn’t actually all that difficult. Indeed, he’d made sure of that. Experiences could affect her – he’d seen plenty proof of that – but that didn’t mean the duplicate of her code he was altering needed to keep that in mind. If Arachne’s mind was a house, and her experiences the furniture, all he was doing was adding a new room, or breaking down a wall. No need to shuffle the sofas around.

He _did_ have to be very careful not to actually ever run the code, though. The code could created thinking beings, and if he ran it just to test, and then stopped it…

Eugh.

Arachne crawled over to him as he typed up some ideas for Arachne’s logical deduction skills. “Master, I’m done! I made breakfast!” Her eyes turned up. “All by myself!” Alan smiled and prepared to congratulate her, but then she kept talking. “… wait. I think there is someone at the door.”

“Really?” He stood up and set his laptop aside. “I didn’t hear a knock.” But then, Arachne’s hearing _was_ better than his own.

“Hmm.” Arachne paused again. “They are gone now.”

Weird. Was one of the neighbors trying to welcome him to the apartment or something? But why _not_ knock?

He opened the front door and leaned out into the hallway. Alan looked left; nothing. He looked right; nothing. Then he looked down.

There, sitting on the ugly blue-and-sprinkle patterned rug, was a brown package covered in what looked like grease stains. Like someone had taken a shoebox, covered it in wrapping paper, and then smeared a McDonalds hamburger all over it. There was a single postage stamp featuring Lady Liberty, and a return address of ‘The President, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC’.

Was this some kind of prank?

Gingerly holding the package by the sides – the least slimy parts– he carried it inside and set it on the kitchen counter, next to where Arachne’s scrambled eggs were cooling.

“What is it, Master?” she asked, crawling up to him and trying to peer over to see.

“I’m not sure. Hang on.” Gripping the greasy paper – but now that he touched it it didn’t _feel_ like grease – he opened the package.

His heart fucking stopped.

There was a motor attached to a filthy jar filled halfway with some clear fluid. There was a bunch of wiring connecting the motor, an old motherboard from the early 2000s, and pieces of a digital watch together. Taking it at a glance, a timer – invisible to Alan himself – would go off, and the motor would then shake the jar, jostling the liquid within.

It was pretty obviously a bomb, sitting _within arm’s reach._

Blind, panicked terror closed its icy grip over his body. Oh God oh God oh God, what should he do? Disarm it? He didn’t know how to fucking disarm a bomb! How much time did he have? There was no blinking timer, he didn’t know! Every second he spent frozen with indecision was one more second it counted down, and, and –

“Run!” he finally shouted, bolting out the front door with Arachne right behind him. He skidded on the carpet and dashed – oh fuck which way, it doesn’t matter pick a direction – right, rushing past several more apartments on either side.

And then the bomb exploded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do leave a comment, let me know what you think.


	10. Boiling Point

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do not own Choice of Robots. Choice of Games and Kevin Gold do.
> 
> Looking for any volunteers to edit.
> 
> Chapter published July 28th, 2019.

Alan Tezuka

The roar of a great beast filled his mind. Crimson light flooded his vision as, behind him, a fireball ripped the door from its hinges and smashed it against the far wall. He felt the shockwave of air slam into his back, making him stumble forward and fall to his hands and knees.

As quickly as it came, the explosion ended. But the heat still singed at his back, the hallway was still flooded with crackling firelight.

Then a shrill, piercing screech cut through the air, and Alan gasped as the sprinklers in the ceiling turned on and began drenching him in water. He rolled onto his back and stared up, blinking as the water droplets stung his eyes.

Something tugged at his arm, hard and cold. It was one of Arachne’s gripper claws. “Master, get up! Get up!” she pleaded, pulling hard enough he feared she’d dislocate the socket if he didn’t comply.

Groaning, he sat up, braced himself against a wall, and stood on shaking legs. He nearly tipped over, but Arachne scuttled behind his legs and helped him brace himself. “What, ugh, what happened?” he muttered, words slurring. His head hurt, and the patterns on the hallway’s carpet swam.

Alan glanced towards the source of the heat, and his stomach dropped. The bomb. The explosion. How had he already forgotten? Did he have a concussion?

The bomb had blown the door clean off, and its smoldering remains still smoked under the drenching sprinklers. Inside the doorframe was a roaring inferno, belching black smoke into the hall. Cooling embers dotted the area around it. He blinked, then raised a hand over his eyes to block the worst of the glare.

The alarms continued to scream.

Inside, his apartment was a veritable firestorm. Flames, thick and rippling, surged and coiled around corners as the heated air circulated furiously within. Even taking a single step seemed to make the heat flare, forcing Alan back. Why weren’t the sprinklers putting it out?

A horrible thought occurred to him. What if the sprinklers _in_ his apartment were damaged in the explosion?

“My stuff!” he shouted, scrambling forward and then backing off as a tongue of flame reached for him. By then people were rushing out of their own apartments, confused and – for those close enough to see the inferno consuming his apartment – visibly terrified.

Alan pointed towards the closest person, a young woman in pajamas, and shouted, “Bucket! Get a bucket of water!”

She nodded hurriedly and dashed back in. While that was going on Alan whipped his phone out from his pockets and dialed 911. “I’m at Fayette Arms, 2680 Fayette Drive, someone just bombed my apartment, the sprinklers must’ve been damaged because it’s not being put out!”

“Understood,” a man on the other side of the line said. There was the briefest of pauses. “Fire department has been alerted, they’re on the way. What’s your name and number, please?”

 _In case they need to call me back,_ Alan guessed. “Alan Tezuka,” he said. “555-630-9065.”

“Alright, how big is this fire?”

Just then the woman came back with a bucket full of sloshing water. Alan put his phone to his shoulder, gripped the bucket, and tossed it on the nearest patch of fire to douse it. The flames sputtered and went down, and to his relief, the patch of water spread and kept new fire from popping up. He tossed the bucket back to Arachne, who was shouting orders and setting up a bucket brigade with the neighbors.

“It’s, um, fairly big.” He peered deeper into his apartment. “I’m outside of my apartment so I can’t see very well, but I think the entire apartment’s uh, uh, oh shit, the entire apartment’s on fire, but the sprinklers outside are keeping it from spreading.”

“Alright, start evacuating the building in case of smoke, the fire department will be there in five minutes.”

“Got it, thanks.” Alan hung up, took another bucket in his hands, tossed it on the flames, and passed it back. Inside he could hear cracks and see plumes of black smoke as his stuff burned, as electronics and plastics bubbled.

Leave the building. That’s what he’d been told. But all his stuff was right there! Surely if they just got a few more buckets of water they could save his stuff!

But smoke stung at his eyes, and while from up close it was hard to tell, when he looked down the long hallway it did start to look… foggy.

He turned to the woman next to him, who’d given him the first bucket. “Fire department’s coming, they told us to evacuate because of smoke!” he shouted over the ringing alarms. “Arachne, let’s go!”

She looked at him, a fresh bucket of water in her claws, and nodded. She tossed what she had onto the blaze and followed him to the fire exit, pushing alongside the other people who’d had enough brains to run out of the burning building first thing.

When they burst outside, the first thing that hit him was the cold. Not only was he away from the fire, but now that he was outside, with the sun shining down on him from behind a handful of wispy clouds, his soaked clothes clung to his skin and leeched the heat from his core. Car alarms wailed.

People gathered around the apartment complex. Gray smoke poured upwards from the shattered windows of his apartment. The AC unit had fallen off and smashed apart on the ground. He watched as the blaze consumed everything he owned, he watched it numb and weak and jittery with adrenaline.

Slowly, Alan sat on the side of the parking lot and wrapped his arms around his knees. Arachne came and sat next to him, lowering her spider legs until the central column of her body touched the ground. “Oh God,” he whispered.

Sirens came soon after. The fire trucks and firemen manning them put out the blaze, but it was too late. Everything Alan had in there had either turned to cinders, or to melted puddles of plastic. His notes on how Arachne’s mind worked, every robot he’d built since he was a child, all of it was gone, reduced to randomly scrambled atoms. He felt like he was going to throw up.

EMTs came around, treating people for smoke inhalation. Apparently Alan’d gotten a light dose of it too, light enough they only had to give him a cough drop to suck on. They also gave him a warm change of clothes.

When the fire was put out, the police came and took a statement from person after person. Finally, they came around for Alan, but he was still numb with shock, and his memory of the questioning just felt like a slideshow.

“Can you describe, to the best of your recollection…”

“She said she heard someone out by the door… this little brown box… I brought it inside and opened it… we ran…”

“Can you think of anyone who might have reason to make an attempt on your life?”

That question, though. That one brought the world back into clarity, sharp as the broken glass on the lawn. The threatening email he’d gotten _filled_ his vision. Static roared in his ears and his eyesight blurred. The facebook profile clamored for attention in his thoughts, and the words **_Tammy Cooper_** roared in his ears louder than a dragon.

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I can’t. There’s probably any number of religious fanatics who object to robotics,” he said with a gesture to Arachne.

News vans began pulling up. Reporters stood with their backs to the singed building, rattling off the events of the morning for their viewers to watch, for their channels to save as video and plaster on the internet.

The police left him alone, and Alan looked up at the charred hole despondently. First his place on campus, now this. He hadn’t even unpacked. If he had, and gotten rid of the flammable cardboard boxes, would anything be different?

“What am I going to do, Arachne?” he muttered.

“Hmm,” she hummed in her musical tones. “Why give ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they do not toil, nor do they spin. Yet I say unto you even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed such as these.”

He looked over at her strangely, with a brow raised. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She shrugged. “I am not very sure, Master. I was trying to cheer you up with a quote from online,” she said, eyes downturned. Then, tentatively, she added, “I think it means homeless people like you are like flowers.”

He sighed. “Great.”

What had he done to deserve this?

“Oh my God, Alan!” he heard Elly’s voice shout. He stood and turned around to catch sight of her neon red hair before she threw her arms around him. “I saw what happened online, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “I’m fine.” He moved the cough drop around his mouth. “It’s fine.”

She pulled back. “Fine?! It’s not fine! Someone just bombed the building you’re living in! What if it’d been your apartment they’d targeted?” He didn’t answer, and instead just looked at the grass miserably. Elly’s eyes widened. “Oh God, it _was_ yours, wasn’t it?” Then she hugged him again.

“It’s fine,” he said again, voice darker than before. His mouth felt dry, so he sucked harder on the cough drop. “I’m just going to… I don’t know.” He ran a hand through his hair. “God, where am I going to sleep?”

Still hugging him, Elly said into his hair, “I’m so glad you’re okay! If you need, you can crash at my place until you find a new apartment.”

He smiled gratefully and twisted his way out of her hug. He smiled, but it felt strained. “Thanks, Elly. I appreciate it.”

“Master, you’ll need new belongings, too. Such as a laptop.”

Alan winced at the reminder that his laptop – and _everything_ on it – was gone. His USB backup drives, gone. Everything was gone. He could buy a new laptop by dipping into his savings. But he couldn’t buy all that hard work back from the grave. Even the mere thought of having to go through and redo all of it made him want to sink into a bed and go to sleep.

“Yeah,” he said, looking down at Arachne. “I guess I will. I can buy one on Amazon. Once I have some place to ship it.”

“Oh _fuck!_ ” That was Josh, pulling up on the street and springing from his sports car before it’d come to a complete stop. “Holy shit! Alan, dude, are you okay?” he asked, sprinting up to them.

“Yeah. Just some light smoke inhalation. It’s fine. See?” He brought the now very small cough drop forward and showed it from between his teeth.

“Smoke inhalation isn’t _fine!_ Holy fuck, what happened?!”

“Someone tried to kill Alan!” Elly shouted, turning towards Josh. “They sent him a _bomb!_ ”

“I got away before it exploded,” he muttered.

“Motherfucker!” Josh swore, loud enough to make Alan jump and visions of fire and smoke flash in his mind. “It was that piece of shit journalist that did this, wasn’t it?! I swear I get my hands on him - !”

“I don’t think Mark has the guts to build a bomb,” Alan said faintly.

Instead Josh just snapped a finger, red in the face. “Mark! That was the name! Painted you like some monster psycho and look what happens! Death _threats_ nothing! I’m gonna find him and – “

“Josh, Josh, we should be making sure Alan’s okay!” Elly interjected before he could keep going on his tirade.

“I _am_ okay!” he protested, tossing his hands into the air. He looked at Josh sheepishly. “But, uh, I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it to the concert tonight.”

Josh’s reaction was to sputter. “Con - the concert?! Forget about the fucking concert, man! Some asswipe just tried to kill you!”

“I know!” Alan shouted, making both Josh and Elly take a step back. He sighed, dragging a hand over his face. “I know. I’m sorry, I just – thanks for getting here so fast. Really. But I think I need to be alone for a bit.”

Josh’s face was creased with worry. “Alright, man. Here.” He took out his wallet and fished up a card from inside and handed it to Alan. “Call this if you need it, seriously. People have gotten more fucked up by less than this.”

He took the card and inspected it. It was the number for a psychiatrist. “Thanks,” he said, putting it in his pocket.

“Alright.” Josh glanced at Elly. “We should probably go, give you space to sort out this shit with the landlord. Dude, _seriously,_ take care of yourself.”

“And don’t forget, my place is yours as long as you need it,” Elly added.

He smiled, but the warmth flooding into his heart amounted to no more than a dead coal. “Thanks, guys. You're good friends. I'm lucky to have you.”

They left while giving him countless nervous looks over their shoulders. And as it turned out, there _was_ a lot to handle with the landlord. His fourth day in the complex and he’d gotten it blown up. There was a lot of empty apologies, and false assurances, and _we’d give you another apartment but we’re booked_ , and _rest assured your security deposit will be returned to you_ , that all added up to a sickeningly polite _Please get the hell out of my building._

When it was all finally over, Alan and Arachne got into his car. He needed to practically drag himself in, and when he was in he gripped the wheel hard enough to turn his knuckles white. The shock finally began wearing off, and his breathing started to speed up.

Someone had tried to kill him. No, someone had tried to _bomb_ him! An honest to God bomb! How would it have felt, if he hadn’t run? His limbs torn apart, ripped asunder… oh God. Hadn’t he suffered enough?!

Leaning his head back, Alan closed his eyes. The comments on his NSF proposal glowed in his mind’s eye.

_Cannot see the proposed utility of this code._

_The code snippets displayed here and the outlined structure are laughably simplistic._

“Master,” Arachne began quietly in her seat.

He cracked open an eye and glanced at her. “Mm?”

She huddled in on herself. “Do you… regret building me? Now that it has brought this upon you?”

His heart dipped. He reached out with a hand and cradled the bottom of Arachne’s mushroom-cap head. “Of course not,” he whispered. “You’re incredible, and none of this is your fault. It’s mine. I could’ve been more careful with the media, but instead I whacked the hornet’s nest. I’m just sorry you got dragged into this. You could’ve died in that blast, too.”

“Thank you, Master. But what are we going to do now?”

Comments from when someone posted a video of Arachne shooting drifted through his head.

_do peeps not learned their lesson after Terminator?_

_theres litterally no way this ends well. i’ll pray this man sees the error of his ways_

“First, I think I need to get something to eat,” he said breathlessly, resting a hand over his stomach. “I missed breakfast. And lunch, now.” But despite that, he didn’t feel hungry.

Just hollow.

With careful, fluid motions, he pulled out of the parking lot and went to the nearest Burger King. Several news vans, late to the party, still loitered around the apartments, adding their own bullshit takes to what had happened. He found a place to park, pulled out the keys, and took a deep breath to steady his thrumming heart.

“Alright,” he told Arachne while opening the driver side door, “let’s go.”

The two of them walked into the Burger King, and drew practically no looks at all. This branch was close to Stanford, so he figured engineering students brought in their pet projects all the time. But Arachne was more than a pet. Why couldn’t anyone around him see that? Why was _he_ the only one who could see how blatantly and obviously amazing she was?

He got a meal big enough to double as breakfast and lunch and sat in a booth near the windows, a window so large it served as a wall. Arachne crawled after him, and hopped up into the booth. The sharp points of her many legs punched holes in the cushions.

The food was… okay. But Alan had to force himself to eat, because he just kept thinking about all the things that’d happened since building Arachne, all the things that’d popped up, all the ways the world seemed determined to shove him down.

The roar of the explosion kept hissing in his ears. The flames kept dancing in his eyes.

Wait, no. He actually _was_ seeing the fire.

Alan looked up at one of the television sets mounted along the Burger King’s ceiling. It was tuned to a news channel. “… today’s breaking story, terrorism in Palo Alto? The apartment complex Fayette Arms was bombed earlier today by a minor explosive device, police officials are saying, utilizing a compound similar to gasoline in that it produces extraordinary amounts of fire as opposed to concussive force,” the anchor said.

Her eyes flicked across the hidden teleprompter. “The explosion occurred in the residence of one Alan Tezuka,” she said, and the program brought up his picture from his High School yearbook. “Mr. Tezuka is a former doctoral student at Stanford University, recently interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle after he claims to have created a sapient robot.” The picture of himself was replaced with a still-frame of Arachne shooting her gun at the range.

“An investigation is ongoing into the origins of the explosion. Was this an act of terror carried out against Mr. Tezuka by well-meaning extremists, fearful of his robots? Was it mere coincidence, and the explosion was part of a larger scheme? Could it be Mr. Tezuka himself was experimenting with unstable chemicals and his work went awry? For more answers we turn to a bomb defusal expert…”

Oh _crap._ Alan pulled his attention away from the screen and tried to look away from the other patrons, tried to make himself as small and unassuming as possible. He ate one of the Cheetos with his meal, chewed, and swallowed without tasting a thing.

But no matter how well he could’ve blended into the crowd, Arachne stood out like a sore thumb. People looked. A mother hurriedly urged her children out of the fast food joint. A muscular black man in a wifebeater looked at Arachne worriedly.

One of the workers came over, a young Asian-American woman in a Burger Joint uniform. “Excuse me, sir, but can I please ask you to take your meal to go?” she whispered, trying not to make a scene. “I’m afraid your… machine, there, is making people nervous,” she said without a single glance at Arachne.

“What?!” Arachne shouted, raising her gripper claws angrily. “Master has done nothing wrong! He’s the one who _was_ wronged, and you want to compound on this by – “

“Arachne, don’t,” he said, holding out a hand. “It’s fine. We’ll _go,_ ” he said sourly, getting up. He gathered up his food, tossed it uneaten into a trash bin, and left with Arachne on his heels. He slammed the door behind him.

As he stomped back to his car, Alan thought back to the phone call with Captain Juliet Rogers.

_“Once you get your doctorate, we’ll see if you can’t start making and selling those robots to the Air Force en masse.”_

_“Once you get your doctorate.”_

_“Have a good – “ Click! “ – day,” he’d finished lamely._

“It’s not right, Master!” Arachne shouted. When had they gotten back in his car? “You’re being treated like a criminal when the real bomber is still out there, at large! I’ve studied police investigation methodologies, there’s no way they’ll ever catch her.”

“Her,” he said.

“Tammy Cooper, handle robotObsession1987,” she said. Alan wondered when she learned about Tammy; had she seen the death threat too?

Arachne clenched her gripper claws and narrowed her eyes angrily. “She tried to _kill_ you,” Arachne whispered. “She can’t be allowed to get away with this!”

All his stuff had gone up in flames in the explosion. Almost all of it. Suddenly the safe, with Arachne’s gun, and some ammunition, felt so heavy in the trunk of his car.

“No,” Alan whispered, clenching his fists. “No, she can’t.”

Static hissed in his ears. The world seemed to tilt back and forth, like a wobbling spirit level balanced on a finger.

“No,” he repeated again. “She can’t get away with this.”

* * *

 Alan wondered how he’d explain this to his parents. _“Hi Dad, hi Mom. What’s up with me? Oh, nothing much. Someone literally tried to blow me up with a bomb, what’s new at home?”_

Whatever. He’d cross that bridge when he got to it.

They’d driven out of town, out to where there were surely no cameras watching, and retrieved Arachne’s gun from her safe, with plenty of ammo. Now Arachne rested on the passenger side seat, gun in her hands, hiding it beneath the dashboard. If he looked closely, he thought he could see her trembling furiously. She hadn’t said a word since they’d agreed Tammy had to pay.

He drove back on a different road than the way he’d left, hands clammy and face stony. The sun was setting on the horizon, casting oblong shadows through the thick bank of transparent clouds that’d dominated much of the day.

Alan’s phone was off.

His GPS was off too. He was driving to San Jose purely by memory.

Memories of Mark’s interview with both himself and Arachne rattled around his head like a screensaver logo.

 _“You’ve gotta admit the robot you made looks pretty dangerous. I’m sure all my readers will be worried something like, well,_ that _could turn on humanity.”_

_“You end up like so many soldiers before you, puppets to corporate and government overlords, in a fight that isn't yours, in an increasingly deadly arms race.”_

Night had fallen in full force by the time he’d arrived in San Jose. The moon would’ve been half full, except clouds covered it. Streetlights and lamps and headlights still flooded the sky with light pollution, but it was otherwise as dark as could be.

As they grew closer to the address, the buildings grew smaller, the graffiti grew thicker, and the paint jobs grew shoddier. He followed the street signs with deathly focus.

Alan hadn’t had breakfast. His lunch had been the few bites at Burger King before being kicked out. He’d skipped dinner entirely. He’d drank nothing but a bottle of water found in the back seat of his car. But he felt nothing despite all that. Just cold, grim purpose, resting in his stomach, sustaining him.

“Are you sure about this?” he whispered to Arachne. “I could do it.”

“No, Master,” she insisted. “You can leave DNA behind. I have nothing. I will be untraceable.”

“I shouldn’t be asking you to do this,” he muttered, turning a corner. “You’re still practically a child. I should be doing this.”

“She tried to hurt you,” Arachne whispered, leaning over to inspect her gun carefully. “She tried to kill you.” The words were said like a mantra. “I know how to fire a gun better than you. Do not worry, Master.”

_Alan Tezuka walks into the bar with the sort of confident, self-important stride that I’ve come to expect from STEM students._

_Arachne herself… is every bit a nightmare up close as from behind a screen._

“If you’re sure,” he muttered.

A car came into view. Deafening rap music with bone-rattling bass boomed from it, then receded into the distance behind him. It was the only car he’d seen in a while; this neighborhood was desolate. Cars were piled up on the sides of the streets for want of a proper parking place. House after house was quiet, dark, and empty.

He turned the last corner to the address Tammy’s Facebook had listed.

Nobody would think much of it. This sort of neighborhood probably saw violence all the time.

 _“You were a fool to speak to the media directly, without consulting me,” Ziegler had said. “But it was even_ more _foolish of you to speak so… poorly of me.”_

_“As if I’ll write you a letter of recommendation after this! As if anyone else will after I blacklist you! Take your consolation prize Master’s and get out!"_

Alan turned off his headlights. He pulled the car to a stop a block away, bringing it between two other cars also parked on the side of the road. He turned the engine off.

He wondered where Josh was, right now. Was he at that concert? Josh’d emailed him more information, when and where, but Alan found he couldn’t remember the time the concert was held. Were they playing right now?

“Here we are,” he whispered, looking to Arachne.

_Dear Alan, it’s not too late to turn back, but this is your first and only warning._

_Please dismantle your robot._

Arachne looked at him lovingly, eyes wide and trusting. “Help me open the door, Master,” she whispered.

Alan leaned over, pressing his stomach against a few of her spider legs, and reached to the handle. “Ready?”

“I am.”

He unlocked the door and helped Arachne push it open. She dropped onto the concrete so quietly, so stealthily, Alan wondered if they weren’t parked on a field of grass. He swiftly closed the door as she crawled away, as silent as death.

Without knowing what to look for, nobody could’ve possibly seen Arachne. But Alan kept his eyes trained on her, watching as she approached Tammy’s one-story house. She pressed herself against one of the walls, covered in chipped paint, and made her way to a window.

 _Smash!_ She drove her arms – both of them holding the gun clasped in front of her – into the window, shattering it like the cheap glass it was. Arachne crawled in like a spider, and then…

A pause.

A distant, startled yelp of fright. A woman’s voice, no older than himself.

**_CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!_ **

A trio of gunshots split the sky. Birds screamed in response.

Arachne hopped out of the house and hurried back. Alan already had the door open for her by the time she arrived, and she crawled in. He slammed the door shut after her.

“I did it, Master,” she whispered. Droplets of blood covered one side of her body. One of them sat over a camera. Another on her tightly clenched pistol. “She is dead.”

“Great job,” he whispered, a weight lifting itself off his shoulders. Alan found himself sitting up straighter. “I couldn’t have done better myself.”

“No, you couldn’t,” Arachne agreed. “You would likely have startled when she noticed you, missed your shot, and been subdued in close quarters combat.”

“Probably,” he agreed. Alan turned on the ignition, but not the headlights, and pulled out into the road. He drove slowly and calmly, as if nothing had happened. Only once he was sufficiently far from Tammy’s home did he turn the headlights on and begin hauling ass down towards the interstate.

“I even managed to get a picture of her, Master!” Arachne said proudly. “I ensured my brain would emit no trackable signal first. Would you like to take a look?”

The highway was straight and empty. He didn’t need to focus. “Of course.”

Arachne turned around in her seat, showing him the cellphone still playing its role as her brain. Arachne went stock still and leaned over. The cellphone flickered, exiting out of the app providing her consciousness, and opened the gallery.

There was a picture of Tammy Cooper, the woman who’d doubtless sent him the bomb. Like on Facebook she was a blonde woman, Caucasian, with manic eyes. Rail thin, like an anorexic. Her hair, in this picture, was filthy and bedraggled.

But here, the spark of life was gone. She was bent over her bed, a small thing barely big enough for someone as petite as her, at an odd angle. Her eyes were wide and a shout of panic sat frozen on her open lips. Blood coated her neck around a black, filthy bullet wound, and more blood had pooled into one of her eyes from another hole in the middle of her forehead. There was another in her gut, staining her filthy shirt black with blood. Her eyes were unfocused.

Alan stared. And stared. And he felt… nothing.

Weren’t people who saw people die for the first time supposed to be torn apart by it? Weren’t they supposed to throw up? Be sick? At least a little unnerved? This was murder, right?

Where was the guilt at ending a life? Where was his rising gorge, the nausea? Would he have had those things even seeing Tammy’s body in real life, and not on a screen? All he felt was relief. That a wrong had been made right. That future danger was averted. He hadn’t felt so complete, so whole, in months. He felt empowered. He felt good.

Was there something… wrong with him?

He closed the picture and turned Arachne back on. Alan continued to drive until he was far away from civilization, but even then he was innervated, alight with nervous energy.

They stopped by a stream and, in the dark of night, cleaned off Arachne and her gun, careful to keep the water from damaging her electronics. The two of them got back in his car. Arachne went into sleep mode. Alan felt he would never fall asleep, but as the clouds parted to reveal the shining, silver moon, he drifted off into dreams before he knew it.

* * *

 Anubis sat on his throne, drumming massive metal claws along its armrests. The larger-than-life metal god leaned back carelessly, staring down at Alan.

“Robot maker, tell me of your sins and be judged,” he boomed, a wicked grin on his jackal head.

“I have committed no sin,” he said. “All I’ve done is defended myself and struck back at those who struck me.”

Anubis opened his mouth wide, revealing rows and rows of metal fangs, like swords. “Is that so? The one you have slain would object most fervently to that. But do not take my word for it.”

Around him, the corridor of dark glass rippled. From one of the sides, the reflection of Tammy appeared, walking towards the surface of the glass. It parted around her like a curtain, and sealed behind her. She looked just like the bloody corpse in Arachne’s picture, mouth open in fear, eyes unfocused now that the muscles holding them in place were limp.

He clenched his fists at her presence. How dare she appear? How dare she defend herself for what she’d done?!

A rumble echoed through the chamber. Anubis held one of his hands up, clenching ropes that led to a scale that had always been there. “And so we come to judgement,” the god said with wicked glee, crimson eyes flaring. On the scales two hearts appeared, real flesh and blood human hearts. One of them expanded and contracted, spurting blood all over its metal plate as it pumped. The other was still, unbeating, and shriveled.

“Robot maker,” Anubis purred. “You have sought blood, and tasted it.” _Creak_ went the scales, Alan’s heart dipping lower than Tammy’s. “Lunatic,” he said, glancing over to where Tammy stood silently. “You have sought blood and failed, yet endangered many in your actions.” _Creak,_ but Tammy’s heart was still lighter than Alan’s.

“You did not have the courage to slay on your own, but urged another to do it.” Alan’s heart went down.

“You brazenly threatened others, about things you know nothing about.” Tammy’s heart went down.

“You ended the innocence of your robot, sullying her claws with blood.”

“You threatened to destroy the pinnacle of this man’s creation, the center of his world.”

And on and on, the scales waving back and forth. In time Anubis had nothing more to say. He held up the scales to his eyes, with Tammy’s heart now heavier than Alan’s, and a low laugh rumbled in his throat. Then Anubis threw his head back and roared in amusement, cackling and jeering uproariously.

The glass floor beneath Alan and Tammy shattered, revealing the blazing furnace of his burning apartment. Anubis laughed one last time, tossing the scales, hearts, Tammy, and Alan himself all into the inferno to burn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do leave a comment, let me know what you think.


	11. When It Rains, It Pours

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do not own Choice of Robots. Choice of Games and Kevin Gold do.
> 
> Looking for any volunteers to edit.
> 
> Chapter published August 31st, 2019.

Alan Tezuka

“Master, wake up,” Arachne said, shoving at him roughly. “It is morning.”

“Hmm, grr,” he growled, sitting up and wiping his eyes. His spine screamed in protest from having slept in his car. Yesterday he’d slept at a table. When would he finally get to sleep in a bed again? “What time is it?”

“Seven thirty-two AM, by our time zone,” Arachne said. “How are you feeling?”

Alan reached a hand for his throat. “Thirsty. Hungry.” He looked out the window; they were still parked by that stream where he washed the blood off Arachne. Dusty rocks stretched off in all directions and, far off, the towering skyscrapers of San Francisco stuck up from the ground. “Let’s put your gun away and get something to eat,” he said, already opening the door to get out. There was no point in wasting time.

First, he checked his phone. No call from his parents, but a bunch of numbers he didn’t know. Probably more reporters, after the bombing yesterday. He blocked them with steady, unshaking fingers. Then they put Arachne’s pistol back in its safe.

Keys in the ignition. Foot on the pedal. His car bumped and stumbled along the dirt path back to the highway, where he easily joined the traffic.

“Alright,” he asked Arachne. “So what’s the plan after I get something to eat?” he asked, keeping his eyes peeled for a place to stop and grab a bite. “I still need to find a place to stay. Maybe take up Elly on her offer. Ugh. Need a laptop too, and to keep jobhunting. All with one phone.” He swore and hit the steering wheel. “Damn it, if only I could’ve had my laptop with me when the bomb went off.”

“It would be more efficient if I had a way to access the internet wirelessly so I could act in tandem with your efforts,” Arachne said sourly, crossing her arms.

“I’ll see if I can’t get you a wireless antennae,” he said, reaching over to pat her on the head maybe a bit harder than he’d intended. But what did he care? Arachne was made of metal, anything he’d do would feel like a light pat to her. Hell, most of her body didn’t even have pressure sensors.

A sign indicated a series of restaurants down the next exit, so he went down the road and parked at the Dunkin Donuts. Remembering what happened yesterday, Alan left Arachne in the car while he ate and drank inside.

Bleary eyed people sat around him, their attention focused intently on their morning coffees. The sun, still climbing up the sky, shone golden rays through the windows that hurt Alan’s eyes. He ate a filling bagel sandwich and drank bottled water to wet his throat. With a spring in his step and a smile on his lips, he went back to the car.

Without greeting Arachne, he started it up and headed back to San Francisco, to Elly’s place.

Already it felt like the world was settling into place. He’d gotten no looks while eating. Tammy wouldn’t trouble him ever again. What _was_ there to worry about? He was smart and hardworking and he had a robot to help him. So what if he was homeless and jobless? He had his degrees, he had his portfolio, this would all be easy.

Hmm. Maybe stop blocking random numbers on habit. One of them could be an employer calling to set up an interview.

Alan yawned as they made their way back to San Francisco, prompting Arachne to hum knowingly. “Are you tired, Master? You have recently slept a substantial amount; this possibly indicates illness.”

He waved it off. “Just didn’t sleep well. Weird dreams.”

“It is possible you are experiencing guilt as a result of having me assassinate Tammy Cooper yesterday,” she suggested.

“I’m not, though.” He rubbed his eyes to try and focus on the road. “Yesterday was just a long day.” And it wasn’t denial. He felt nothing for her death. His heart just felt leaden, like a lump of stone had been swapped with it.

“If you say so, Master. I believe you.”

“Thanks.” He let go of the wheel with one hand and fished out his cell. “Should probably call Elly, let her know I’m coming.” Keeping his eyes on the road, he tapped along the screen and called her number. It rang a few times, during which he put it on speaker.

Finally, she answered. “Alan? How are you?” she asked, her voice warm and worried over the phone.

“Hi Elly, I’m fine, thank you.”

“You sure? Where did you sleep last night?”

Well, there was no good way to say this. “Slept in my car. I know you said I could come by your place, but I had to take care of a few things first, and by then it was dark.”

“Hey, it’s fine. So I’m guessing you’re heading over?”

“Yeah. Thanks for letting me stay until I get all this sorted out.”

“Anytime, Alan. See you soon!” _Click._

Well, that was that sorted.

Alan and Arachne made their way back to the city, which was just waking up. Crowds of pedestrians clogged the streets, tiredly making their ways to their nameless, unimportant coffee shops of choice. He stole a glance at Arachne, who was staring intently into the masses.

“What’re you thinking of?” he asked, curious.

“The probability of the surrounding population deciding to assault us,” she responded bluntly.

“And? What did you come up with?”

“Unlikely, but catastrophic if it should occur.”

“Seems like a fair assessment to me. Let’s get to Elly’s sooner rather than later.” He glanced at Arachne. “Just be cautious about simply doing ‘odds times effect’ risk calculation, though. If you were to follow that, you’d be constantly working to stop whatever unlikely end of the universe that can occur.”

Arachne paused for a moment. Despite her 360 vision, Alan got the impression she was looking at him. “Noted, Master. I will search for a more practical algorithm.”

“You do that.” It wouldn’t do for Arachne to worry herself to death, if robots even could.

Elly’s place was in SoMa, one of San Francisco’s better neighborhoods to live in. Museums dominated the streets, resting at odd angles compared to the usual ninety degree blockiness of big cities. There was a glistening supermarket, covered in glass and white metal, parks with eclectic modern art sculptures for kids to play in, and various apartment complexes painted with artistic graffiti.

She lived in one such complex, so Alan found a place to park, walked in through the front door, and rode the elevator heedless of the confused looks given to Arachne. Light elevator music played, and he tapped his foot to the beat. Arachne looked at his legs, then tried doing the same. The result was a haphazard ripple across her legs as they clicked sharply on the ceramic tiles.

 _Ding_ went the elevator as it came to a stop, opening its sliding metal doors to reveal a homey hallway with toasty, flower-shaped lamps resting between every apartment door. “Alright, this way,” he said, stepping out and leading Arachne. It wasn’t the first time he’d been over at Elly’s and Alan still remembered where to go like the back of his hand.

Apartment 303, there! Alan reached up and knocked firmly, willing a smile into place.

“Coming!” came Elly’s muffled voice. The door opened inward, revealing Elly’s smiling face and the tulip-red walls of the apartment behind her. “Alan, come in!” she said, stepping to the side and letting the two of them inside. She shut the door behind them, giving Alan a good look at her apartment.

It hadn’t changed much from the last time he’d been here. There _was_ a spot on the walls where the ruby paint had been worn away to reveal the white concrete underneath. But there was still the rich brown couch in the middle of the room, still the communal kitchen smelling richly of coffee, still the rainbow tapestries hung up from the ceiling, still the tray of potted plants under a window, monitored by wires and sensors.

“Alright, here’s the bed,” Elly said, drifting over to the sofa. “It opens up. I’ll go get a pillow and some blankets for you.”

“Thanks a bunch, Elly.”

“Hey, how many times do I have to say it’s no problem?” she said with a wry grin. Then she looked down. “And you must be Arachne! I haven’t seen you powered on before.”

Arachne stared back up at her curiously, gripper claws tense at her sides. “By your overly specific mention I assume you have seen me unpowered before?”

“I did! Alan called me over to help figure out what movies and shows he’d teach you with.”

“I see,” Arachne said simply, before crawling away to look at the plants.

“Serious little thing, isn’t she? Make yourself comfortable,” Elly said, waving him down onto the couch before vanishing into a door that probably led to her bedroom.

Alan shrugged, and did, reclining on the couch and bringing his phone to bear. Alright, so what did he need? First he needed to check his email for responses to the jobs he’d applied for.

He checked. Nothing.

Then he needed a laptop, a backpack but he could get that from Walmart or something, a wireless antennae for Arachne, he also needed to start looking for another place to live, and… what else?

He’d had, before the bomb, the idea that maybe he could start his own company. But that’d been such a terrible idea, hadn’t it? Even just a blog interview had nearly gotten him fucking _blown up._ He just couldn’t. He _couldn’t._ He’d do something else, anything else.

Elly came back with pillows and a blanket, helped open up the couch into a bed, then bid him farewell and left for work, leaving him and Arachne alone in her apartment.

Just the two of them, with him swiping and tapping at his phone and Arachne looming over Elly’s plant experiment. It was a cozy silence. Though Alan had to lie on top of the blankets, he felt too warm wrapped up in them, like he was on fire.

Laptop, ordered. Antenna, ordered. Some tools to actually put it on Arachne, ordered. He had to dig into his savings to pay for it, though. But it was worth it for Arachne.

And… done! No emails, though. So Alan busied himself throwing out more hooks. Hopefully someone would bite.

Arachne, true to form, moved with inhuman motive. After some time looming over the flowerpots like a statue, she zipped over to the kitchen, slipped, and crashed into the fridge.

“Whoops, careful!” he’d called, but before he could go help her Arachne had already gotten back up.

She opened and closed drawers, and peered inside the fridge. She held tubs of yogurt in her grippers and shook them up and down. Alan had the idea to tell her to cut it out, stop playing with Elly’s things, but she wasn’t hurting anything, and he was sure Elly wouldn’t mind.

And while he was _also_ sure she wouldn’t mind him helping himself to lunch, it was better not to press his luck. He ordered fast food and had that instead of the produce in his friend’s fridge. Not that Alan didn’t try to eat at least a _little_ healthy.

He ordered a salad with it, and all.

It took a bunch more cover letters and applications before Elly came home. By then Arachne was off… somewhere and Alan’d had about enough of looking at wanted ads as he could stand.

Elly came in with a leather handbag slung over her shoulders. He was laying sideways on the couch-bed, feet up with his phone held above his face when he saw her come in. He smiled and slung himself off, standing tall. “Hello Elly, how was your day?” he asked.

“Great!” Elly looked at him and frowned. “Uh, I know this should be obvious but are you feeling okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t want to say anything earlier with…” She waved a hand in the air. “Everything you had going on, but you’ve been kinda off today.”

“Off how?”

Arachne’s voice cut in from behind. “You are not exhibiting many of the emotional markers traditionally employed by humans, Master. The word is, I believe, uncanny.” Alan turned to look at her and his eyes widened; there, impaled on one of her legs, was a tube of toothpaste, leaking all over the floor. Arachne followed his eyes to it, then looked back up at Elly. “Also, I apologize for damaging your toothpaste.”

She giggled, putting to bed any fears that she’d get angry. “Oh, that’s cute. It’s alright, Arachne.” Elly looked back at him. “So anyway, yeah. Don’t feel you’re in any rush to get over it or anything, but you _really_ should look into that card Josh gave you.”

“Maybe when I get a job to pay for it,” he deflected. “Anyway – “

His phone rang. It was the ringtone his Mom used.

He looked away, remembering to smile sheepishly. “Uh, sorry, one second.” Alan pulled it from his pocket and answered. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, sweetie,” she replied, not even using video. She sounded tired, too. Had Alan ever heard her sound so tired? “I’m afraid I have some bad news. You should sit down.”

His gut sank. _Uh oh._ Did she find out about the bombing? No, that wouldn’t be _news._ Had something happened? Did Mom and/or Dad get fired from their jobs?

After sitting on the bed, he replied. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

Elly caught his eyes and mouthed _‘What’s going on?’_

Alan shrugged in return.

Then Mom’s response came. “There’s no easy way to say this, honey. Your father passed away last night.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter gave me so much trouble. It's the transition from the bomb to the funeral, but I also didn't want to attach it to the tail-end of the bomb, nor stick it in front of the funeral. So it got turned into a short little interlude chapter.
> 
> Please do leave a comment, let me know what you think.


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